Living a lie
: McDonald’s put millions of dollars behind launching a “blog” and it’s a stupid, insulting waste.
On the Super Bowl, McDonald’s did a jokey commercial about a french fry shaped like Abe Lincoln. Fine. Dumb but fine. They put a url on the ad and it, eventually, leads to a fake blog.
Just this morning at iMedia, I told the publishers and marketers here that they should not make Dr. Pepper’s mistake when it made a cow blog for its milk-based soft drink.
This is a human medium, I said. It’s about people talking to people. We don’t want to talk to a cow; that’s as off-key as coming to a wedding dressed up like a pig. We don’t want you to lie to us and think we’re stupid and that we want to talk to a character a marketer made up.
Would your PR department have a cow or a fictional character call a reporter at The New York Times? No? Then why would you do that do your customers in their medium? Yes, of course, we are smart enough to know it’s your attempt at a joke. But you’re not smart enough to see that you’ve wasted our time. [via Steve Rubel]
