advertising a fast food restaurant is hard. you have to constantly come up with new and exciting combinations of cheddar goo and rubbery mushrooms, you have to make sure that your happy meal toys don't suffocate the many dumbass children that will inevitably try to swallow them with their nuggets, and you have to basically live in the denial that you are not catering primarily to stoned college students at 3am. plus, when you run a classy place (or 30,000) like mcdonalds, you've got to make sure that your advertising is hitting every possible audience. so what do you do? you make custom websites for everyone- or at least "everyone" as is defined by the ethnicity identification survey at the beginning of the sat's. so let's throw some micky d's on this bitch and see how they're advertising to YOU:
ASIAN AMERICANS:
www.i-am-asian.com
you know right off the bat that something is wrong with the pr of the asian american community when i-am-asian.com leads to a mcdonalds website. regardless, you go to the site and you see that mcdonalds has created a mirror of your very own room, mr. asian american! but wait, how did mcdonalds know what your room looked like? how did they ever figure out that you, as an asian american, love lava lamps and video games? don't worry, they have plenty of authentic things too, like godzilla action figures, some year-of-the-pig thing, and enough paper cranes for a fourth grade classroom. also, they have a fun minigame involving the spiritual journey that every asian american must make at least once in his or her life- crossing a makeshift wooden bridge from the mcdonalds in hawaii to the mcdonalds in los angeles.
AFRICAN AMERICANS:
www.365black.com
from the intro line alone, you know that mcdonalds took absolutely no chances with the black community. i found this site by clicking the "havin' fun" category on the mcdonalds homepage, but as you can see, this site is the opposite of fun.
i dare you to look for a minigame.
LATINOS:
www.meencanta.com
parrots! fuzzy dice! ay yay yay! this website has so much latin flavor, it makes me want to run out and grab some taco bell. you've got soccer, graffiti, music, everything! plus they have some really awesome minigames involving these totally wacky characters:
this website is the polar opposite of 365black.com.
CHILDREN:
www.happymeal.com
say what you want, but nobody thinks more of the children than mcdonalds. games, coloring, social networking... there is so much fun 2.0 to be had on this site, you almost forget the friendly reminder ronald has left for you in the top right-hand corner:
WHITE PEOPLE:
basically anything that has the mcdonalds logo on it and hasn't already been covered in this post. but if you need to see the absolute whitest example it is definitely this:
HOMELESS/CRAZY PEOPLE:
.....huh? there's no advertising directed towards the homeless/crazy? but they are some of the most frequent visitors to mcdonalds! i guess we will have to change that.
3 comments:
Wow. I always noticed their marketing to different minorities, but I never realized they went quite this far with it. If I was anything but Caucasian I'd probably take offense.
Brilliant, as always.
When you look at it, the B*clap clap* LT commercial is kind of the same as the gap "CRAZY/COOL" campaign. haha
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