Commercial rant #2 - McDonald’s/gofbot.com
Watch me be much too lazy to copy the formatting from the first one of these I did! Hopefully I’ll get close enough. I had such lofty plans to make them all look the same… oh well.
I have a vile and thorough hatred for all of McDonald’s advertising, particularly since they adopted the obnoxious “I’m lovin’ it” slogan. I kinda like McDonald’s, but I heartily resent their attempts to be hip by using what they interpret as the vernacular currently en vogue by the target youth segment. Can’t a company as monstrous as McDonald’s afford some quality advertising? Compare them to Bud Light, a brand of similar stature. Their commercials are awesome. How come McDonald’s commercials suck so consistently? Some things I will never understand.
Brief synopsis of the commercial currently pissing me off: Some young Generation-X whippersnappers start a dot-com company called gofbot.com. They claim that it will be bigger than the Big Mac. The entire population of the United States is floored at this assertion and it becomes the hottest topic of discussion — it’s on 24-hour news channels, it’s on the street, in the gym, everywhere. “Bigger than the Big Mac? Can it be? It’s impossible!” The whippersnappers at gofbot.com check their site and a giant, cartoonish counter informs them that they have a had a total of three visitors. Gofbot.com is not bigger than the Big Mac, because apparently nothing can be bigger than the Big Mac.
My beef with this ad: Aside from being eight years too late to take advantage of the dot-com boom-and-burst’s relevance, this ad is just freaking stupid. No one would arbitrarily claim that their brainchild will be bigger than the Big Mac to begin with, and if they did, no one would care. The people in the immediate vicinity would point and laugh at what the moron said and then forget the whole thing.
But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that people actually did care and actually were amazed. The whole world is aflutter at the astonishing assertion that gofbot.com will be bigger than the Big Mac. Don’t you think that a few more than three people would have checked out the web site, just to see? Yeah.
Back to the internal logic of the commercial, nobody visits gofbot.com, a featureless and apparently completely pointless web site. And, therefore, nothing can be a bigger deal than the Big Mac. They had to stretch the limits of entrepreneurial plausibility to come up with something so completely useless that it would flop and make the Big Mac look appealing by comparison? That’s asinine.
Conclusion: The Big Mac is better than… a complete failure wrought by defective minds. Mmmm mmmm, Let’s all go buy one.
This is all compounded, by the way, by McDonald’s insistence on calling it the “Big Mac Sandwich” in the face of society-at-large’s widespread understanding of what is meant by “Big Mac.” Plus it’s a freaking burger, not a sandwich. There’s a difference. I can’t remember if they actually do that in this commercial (I think they don’t, which is a step in the right direction), but if you visit gofbot.com (Gasp! I’m only the fourth visitor!) they call it a Big Mac Sandwich and tack on the little (r) after “Big Mac.” Don’t click anything on that page, by the way; it’ll take you to the McDonald’s web site and then you’ll feel yucky.
Filed under: Bizarre, Commentary, Dumbass, Food, Funny Bone, Internet, Other, Reviews
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