Sunday, November 22, 2015

McDonald's - Not Made Of Lips And Assholes

I don't know if this is happening in the states, but McDonald's is running a series of television commercials (and maybe radio commercials - I don't know, I only listen to the BBC or podcasts like a proper nerd), which could very easily have the tagline "McDonald's - Not as gross as you think". They go like this: Hey did you hear that rumor about how our fries/chicken nuggets/hamburgers are grown by a mad scientist in a lab/made out of slime and boogers/dehydrated genetically modified turd juice? None of that is true! Our food is made out of food, like, real food, we swear. We can prove it: here's a picture of a guy in a field holding up a potato. See? Eat at McDonald's! Tell your friends!

McDonald's, this is probably not your best advertising idea. First of all, no one who is over the age of twelve and/or a paranoid conspiracy theorist who just knows your entire existence is just a government plot actually thinks chicken nuggets are made out of throbbing lumps of faceless, organless meat piles, no matter how much their eight year old nephew insists that's what he saw on his school field trip to an industrial chicken farm. That kid is a pathological liar, just like the rest of them. Second of all, people in general are gross and would continue to eat your swill even if they believed in such demonstrable nonsense. The problems I would like you to address in your advertising (if you insist, because I do genuinely think you'd be better off continuing to pretend that eating at McDonald's is how most happy marriages start or that spontaneous parties frequently break out there for no discernible reason) are these: Why do your hamburgers taste like burnt plastic, and how do you justify serving children a box of food for lunch that contains enough calories to last them two days? Yes, I know they have parents, but their parents might be morons, or just tired from having to haul their fat kid around all day. Besides which, "they failed worse" is rarely a winning argument. Seriously though, the problem is less that people think the way your food is made might be gross, and more that the taste of your food actually is fucking gross. Also? You're going to set off the conspiracy theorists who maybe haven't heard those rumors because if you're spending that much money to convince people those things aren't true, then they obviously are true and WHAT ELSE ARE YOU HIDING?

Just, you know, think about it. And quit giving little kids diabetes.