Burger King to Pay for Burger-King Couple's Wedding

Social Media & Weddings >

Engagements and weddings can lead to great headline copy. Growing up in Iowa, you often hear the tall tale of a young man from the town Manly tying the knot with a young lady from the nearby town Fertile, as in “Manly Man Marries Fertile Woman.” And surely, somewhere in history a Hall has married an Oates. But this one takes the cake. Or the burger.

Joel Burger and Ashley King – yes, Burger-King – are getting hitched this July in Jacksonville, Illinois. The pair is from nearby New Berlin, and their announcement, with an engagement portrait posed at a Burger King sign, ran in a couple local papers. Following a column in the Springfield Journal-Register, the story took off online. The New York Daily News, HuffPost, BuzzFeed.

But the big news came just a few days after story was posted. Burger King, the actual corporation, got in touch with the couple and is taking care of all the wedding expenses and providing gifts for the July 17 event.

Following the initial column, Dave Bakke, the Journal-Register reporter, reached out the company’s media relations department about the couple; Ashley had tried to get in touch with the company previously about the wedding without success. Brakke soon heard from Burger King’s public relations company, and things got rolling. Monday, the company got reached out to the couple over Skype and delivered the news.

“When we heard about the happy, Burger-King couple, we felt an overwhelming urge to celebrate their upcoming marriage,” Eric Hirschhorn, Burger King Brand spokesman, told Bakke. On so many levels it felt like fate; they found each other and their story found us.”

As for the couple, Ashley summed it up pretty well.

“Oh my god, it’s going to be crazy!” she said.