Skaptoburger Turns a Hate-Rating Attack Into a Love Story
Skaptoburger's 'Rate Love Over Hate' is a 2018 digital campaign created by Sofia agency proof., in which the brand publicly aligned itself with Sofia Pride and LGBTQ+ acceptance by offering customers a symbolic choice between a 'love' burger and a 'hate' burger, and then invited supporters to counter a coordinated wave of hostile Facebook ratings with positive ones.
Published in Bulgaria in June 2018, the campaign represents a documented departure from conventional food advertising into purpose-led activism, according to clapboard.com. Skaptoburger, a independent Bulgarian burger brand, entered one of the most polarising social conversations in the country at the time, doing so not through a passive statement but through a live, participatory mechanism that unfolded publicly on social media. The campaign's visual identity centred on a rainbow-coloured 'Love/Hate' message, framing the audience's choice in the starkest possible moral terms.
In Bulgaria, the campaign launched against a charged social backdrop. According to clapboard.com, nearly 79% of Bulgarians opposed legal recognition of same-sex marriage at the time of the campaign's release. Rather than retreating from that reality, proof. and Skaptoburger built the campaign's entire architecture around it, treating public opposition not as a risk to be managed but as the creative engine of the work. The result was a campaign that made the brand's values visible precisely because those values were contested. Clapboard.com records the campaign as containing one media asset published in the digital medium, with creative direction led by Angel Iskrev.
Proof. identified a specific and measurable tension in Bulgarian public life as the strategic foundation for this campaign. Bulgaria's restaurant-chain market was growing at the time: according to Scribd, the number of chain restaurant outlets in Bulgaria rose from 1,093 in 2017 to 1,138 in 2018, an approximate 4.1% increase. Within that expanding competitive set, dominant players including Happy Bar and Grill, which held 21.8% relative market share with 24 Bulgarian outlets in 2018 per Scribd, and international chains such as McDonald's, which held 11.2% relative market share with 35 outlets per Scribd, occupied the safe centre of the market. Burger King held 1.4% relative market share in Bulgaria in 2018, according to Scribd, illustrating how fragmented the burger category specifically remained.
Skaptoburger had no realistic path to competing on scale or media spend against those incumbents. Proof.'s strategic insight was that cultural specificity and moral clarity could generate the kind of earned attention that paid media budgets cannot buy. By anchoring the campaign to Sofia Pride and LGBTQ+ acceptance, the agency gave the brand a position that larger, more cautious competitors would not occupy. According to clapboard.com, nearly 79% of Bulgarians opposed legal recognition of same-sex marriage at the time, a figure that makes the campaign's stance not merely progressive but commercially courageous. The strategy accepted that backlash was not just possible but probable, and then converted that probability into the campaign's central mechanic: if opponents attacked the brand's Facebook rating, the brand would invite the public to respond. Opposition was the media plan.
Angel Iskrev served as creative director and copywriter on 'Rate Love Over Hate,' according to clapboard.com, working alongside art director Ivan Angelov and fellow copywriter Nikolay Dievski, both documented by clapboard.com as part of the proof. creative team. The campaign was produced by proof., the Sofia-based agency, in June 2018.
The creative execution operated on two simultaneous registers. The first was symbolic: a rainbow-coloured visual identity built around the binary language of 'Love' and 'Hate,' applied to Skaptoburger's product in a way that made the brand's position legible at a glance, according to adsoftheworld.com. The second register was operational. The campaign did not simply publish a statement and wait; it constructed a call to action that was directly responsive to the hostility it anticipated. When opponents began coordinating negative Facebook ratings against the brand following its public LGBTQ+ support, the campaign mechanism activated: supporters were explicitly urged to counter hostile ratings with positive ones, as documented by adsoftheworld.com.
The creative system's sophistication lies in how tightly the symbol and the mechanic reinforce each other. The rainbow 'Love/Hate' framing made the moral stakes of rating the business unmistakable — a one-star review was not a comment on the burger, it was a legible act of opposition to the campaign's stated values, and a five-star review was its inverse. This compression of political act into platform behaviour is the campaign's primary creative achievement. According to adsoftheworld.com, the Facebook rating fell from 4.7 to 3.3 within hours of the initial attack, which made the counter-mobilisation call to action urgent and emotionally immediate rather than abstract.
No independently audited performance data for 'Rate Love Over Hate' is publicly available, and no verified reach, conversion, or sales figures have been attributed to the campaign by a named source. What is documented, however, is a specific and verifiable sequence of platform events that functions as a proxy for real-time impact.
According to adsoftheworld.com, Skaptoburger's Facebook rating dropped from 4.7 to 3.3 within hours of the campaign's launch, as coordinated opposition targeted the page with negative reviews. According to clapboard.com, the rating then rose above 4.9 within approximately 72 hours, following the counter-mobilisation that the campaign explicitly invited. That arc — a drop of 1.4 rating points followed by a recovery that exceeded the original score — is a measurable, time-stamped record of audience participation at scale, achieved without documented paid amplification.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates a model of effectiveness that operates through consequence rather than reach. By designing a mechanic that made opposition visible and quantifiable, proof. ensured that every hostile action taken against the brand generated a public record of the brand's courage and a renewed incentive for supporters to act. The campaign's architecture transformed platform hostility into a recruitment tool for brand advocates. In a Bulgarian market where purpose-led food advertising had no established precedent among the dominant chains documented by Scribd, that structural innovation is the campaign's lasting contribution to the category.
Clapboard Score: 67/100.
Rate Love Over Hate is a 2018 digital campaign by Skaptoburger, created by Sofia agency proof., that publicly supported Sofia Pride and LGBTQ+ acceptance in Bulgaria. The campaign invited customers to choose between a symbolic 'love' burger and a 'hate' burger, and called on supporters to counter coordinated negative Facebook ratings with positive ones, according to clapboard.com.
Proof., a Sofia-based advertising agency, created Rate Love Over Hate in June 2018. Creative director and copywriter Angel Iskrev led the work, with art director Ivan Angelov and copywriter Nikolay Dievski, according to clapboard.com. The campaign was published in Bulgaria as a digital campaign containing one media asset.
Skaptoburger's Facebook rating fell from 4.7 to 3.3 within hours of the campaign's launch, according to adsoftheworld.com. Following the brand's call for supporters to counter the hostile reviews, the rating recovered to above 4.9 within approximately 72 hours, as documented by clapboard.com, demonstrating measurable real-time audience participation.
Proof. built the campaign around Bulgaria's sharpest cultural tension. According to clapboard.com, nearly 79% of Bulgarians opposed legal recognition of same-sex marriage at the time, making Skaptoburger's stance commercially courageous. The strategy used anticipated opposition as its central creative mechanic, giving the brand differentiation that dominant competitors such as Happy Bar and Grill and McDonald's would not claim.
Bulgaria's chain restaurant market grew to 1,138 outlets in 2018, according to Scribd. Happy Bar and Grill held 21.8% relative market share and McDonald's held 11.2%, per Scribd, leaving independent brands like Skaptoburger unable to compete on scale. Rate Love Over Hate pursued earned attention through cultural specificity rather than media spend, targeting a position larger chains avoided.
Rate Love Over Hate by Skaptoburger received a Clapboard Score of 67 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's structural ingenuity and cultural courage in the Bulgarian market, balanced against the absence of independently verified performance data and its single-asset digital format, as assessed by Clapboard's editorial team.
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