McDonald’s–“Bring the Heat” and “He Loves Me Not”

I logged onto WordPress today with the intention of reviewing that inane McDonald’s commercial where the girl in the fedora is destroying two men at pool, while constructing some lame, 1970s-comic-book-y metaphor about how she’s beating them while she does so. Something about planning out her moves and then “bringing the heat”.

My main beef with that ad, and nearly every McDonald’s advert like it, is that it portrays such delicacies as Chicken McNuggets or french fries as the type of food you should be eating while you’re doing something really hip or edgy. It’s their lame attempt at appealing to the 20-somethings demographic, but it completely overlooks the fact that I would not want to be eating food from McDonald’s 2 hours after it had been ordered. Not now, and not ever. You have to eat McNuggets in like 5 minutes, or else they just taste like cold hunks of stuffing.

Unfortunately, McDonald’s didn’t make that particular commercial available to me on Youtube. They’d rather only force me to see it twice a day on TV, yet block me from seeking it out of my own volition. Oh well.

Instead, today I’d like to lambaste THIS McD’s ad:

For the technologically impaired–two girls are sitting in a McD’s, and see some doofus boy one of them likes. So, naturally, they play the “He loves me/he loves me not” game with the most romantic object I can think of–wedges of frozen potatoes that were shipped hundreds of miles before being dunked in a vat of boiling grease and dumped and directly mixed with salt. Fries which are probably cold by now. The girl eats her last fry, regretfully muttering that he loves her not. But don’t worry, reader–the doofus boy walks over and shoves one solitary leftover fry in her face before strolling out the door like he’s Jim Stark.

Now, I’m not omniscient. Sometimes I’ll miss out on social cues. But are you really expecting me to believe that it’s normal human behavior to walk up to a person you only halfway know at a McDonald’s, wave ONE fry in front of their face, and expect that to be some sort of pick-up line? If I tried that in real life, I would be socially ostracized. This is McDonald’s trying to be all cutesy, but it just ends up being lame-sy.

Frustration Index Meter: 4/10

(Ed. Note: Tomorrow I’m going to tackling a series of commercials that I absolutely cannot stand, so be sure to tune in! And as always, shoot me a line if there’s one ad in particular you want to see me make fun of.)

Wendy’s–“Ever Wonder?”

Allow me to preface this–I’m generally a private person. I make polite small talk when making a financial transaction, and I grit my teeth as I try to get my neighbors to stop talking to me as quickly as possible, but I certainly would never consider talking to a complete stranger from across a restaurant to pose an open-ended hypothetical. The latest Wendy’s spokeswoman, however, has a habit of doing just that.

From what I’ve regrettably seen thus far, she’s not the least bit shy about striding up to make chit-chat with a stranger at a grocery store, a 24-hour gas station, or even stowing away in the back of two strangers’ car to tell them that an item on the menu at said person’s local Wendy’s is superior to whatever they were planning to eat (read: garbage). Besides her voice, these actions could be considered annoying (and, in the case of the car, probably illegal), but this commercial just takes it to another level.

I know Wendy’s is attempting to be–ahem–“funny” with this advertisement, but they fail on every level. First of all, didn’t Ms. Redhead’s (MR) mother ever teach her that it’s very rude to talk across strangers? Also, that not talking to strangers is not only good advice as a child, but as an adult? Furthermore, it’s odd enough that Ms. Generic Businesswoman (MGB) agrees with her query, but just accepts that she was able to deduce all this simply by staring at MGB’s (rather healthy-looking) lunch. Finally, I guess MGB’s relationship with “him” was on the rocks, because all it took was two sentences from a complete stranger to make her resolve to dump him. Huh?

Note to Wendy’s: “funny” and “strange” can occasionally mean the same thing, but not in this context.

Frustration Index meter: 3/10

Pepsi: King’s Court

What. A. Mess.

I haven’t been subjected to this unique strain of awful in several months–I think, miraculously, somebody in the industry had the good sense to realize how truly bad it was and send it to the scrap heap–but that said, I still cringe when I look at this.

This is a perfect example to show how a commercial can quickly spiral from “bad” to “worst thing ever” throughout the creative process. The slogan at the end of this commercal reads “Where there’s Pepsi, there’s music.” While the problems with that assertion are obvious, most of them stem from the fact that Pepsi and music are mutually exclusive. It’s too abstract of a selling point for what should be the insanely easy task of promoting the 3rd-best selling soda in the U.S. (behind Coke and Diet Coke). Somebody should have stepped in and said “Hey, why don’t we just emphasize that soda is refreshing when you’re thirsty?” They could have done one of those commercials where the plucky 20-something is walking down the street, and every sip of Pepsi makes her world explode with color or makes good things happen around her. You know, since Pepsi’s number-one target market is young people.

But instead, they decided to go with the whole “lip-synching singers in a king’s darkened court” approach. I’ve only had one marketing-related class in college, so I’m not an “expert” necessarily. But just re-reading that premise causes me to have a gut reaction to its inherent stupidity.

The Stupid Train doesn’t stop there. They got Sir Elton John to be the king, and the costume is just awful. The cheesiest king getup, like something you would rent at a costume shop for a school play. To ruin it even further, they had him wear gaudy blue glasses, as though we wouldn’t recognize him without some crazy shades on, or maybe it was to match the Pepsi–either way, it just made it look even worse.

Then there’s some dweeb making our ears bleed on purpose doing a Nelly cover. What the makers of this TV spot failed to recognize is that they’ve associated “pain in my earlobes” with “Pepsi” in my subconscious mind. Hey, Pepsi marketing team! You’re doing it wrong! Apparently the girl lip-synching an Aretha Franklin remix won The X Factor, so why not just let her sing for real? Or just have her be the star and promote Pepsi by herself, if she’s that talented? I guess they thought this would all be funny, but it’s funny in a bad way, like watching somebody else fail miserably, over and over again.

At the end of the day, though, she liberates the Pepsi and de-thrones the king (or queen, as it were). Good for her. They flash the (stupid) slogan, and you think that this (stupid) commercial will finally be over. But for some (stupid) reason, they decide to kick you one last time by throwing Flava Flav in right at the end. No, boy. No.

What. A. Mess.

Frustration Index Meter: 10

Dr. Pepper Ten

Hoo boy. Where to even begin with this one?

First of all, I will have you know that this was the commercial that set the wheels a-turnin’ for this particular blog. As soon as I saw it for the first time, I experienced equal parts of revulsion, confusion, and utter disappointment. As of the time of this writing, 1.73 times more people have disliked this clip than liked it on Youtube, so I’m clearly not alone in my discontempt.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: this commercial is blatantly sexist. You’ll note that I chose not to say “sexist towards women”, because as a man, I find this stereotype to be fairly degrading. I appreciate mindless action films as much as the next guy, but to suggest that it’s exclusively a male genre is bordering on farcical. Just because I’m a male doesn’t mean that I’m incapable of the attention span needed to enjoy an engrossing drama, nor does somebody being female mean they can’t enjoy explosions. Frankly, I’m sure there are tens of thousands of women who enjoyed 300 more than I did. I’m aware of the fact that the demographics of action movies and rom-coms differ, but I think it’s a little much to suggest that an entire gender cannot possibly enjoy something.

This leads me to my larger point–why on Earth would Dr. Pepper make a conscious decision to alienate fifty percent of their target market with this commercial? According to Captain Catch Phrase, Dr. Pepper Ten is a man’s beverage, and is specifically “not for women”. Why not? This isn’t an advertisement for Viagra or Norelco–it’s an advertisement for soda. Soda–especially name-brand soda–is gender-neutral, and I would challenge anybody to disprove that claim. If anything, I would bet that the consumer demographics for various diet sodas trend toward women. So again, why on Earth would the powers-that-be at Dr. Pepper decide to brush aside potential consumers? I’m amazed that this commercial passed through the hands of hundreds of professionals without being vetoed.

Frustration Index Meter: 10/10