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The series of McDonalds adverts featuring rapping children are possibly the most mentally scarring thing I've seen on TV since I pressed the wrong button and stumbled across the porn channel aged eight. 'What's in the box that always rocks? (I'm lovin' it!) When I do what I like, creeping through the jungle like Action Man might. (I'm lovin' it!) With our Care Bear friends/ Helping Action Man defeat Dr X again...' Never mind the gender stereotypes being reinforced ('If you're an Action Man boy/ Or a Care Bear girl' - I'm surprised the feminists haven't written in), the tune has been stuck in my head for days at a time; the idea of squeaky-voiced prepubescent white rappers is partly horrifying and partly hilarious The company has an advertising budget bigger than the debt of your average African nation, but at the first bleat of protest from nutritionists everything goes horribly awry. Part of the recent advertising campaign featured shots of career women meeting for salads* in a sqeaky-clean McDonalds; frankly, if I was taken for a powerlunch at a fast-food restaurant I would turn down instantly anything being asked of me. In one magazine, they had bought out about ten pages of advertising space (which doesn't come cheap) and ran a fake fashion shoot in one of their newly-renovated restaurants. All the taglines said things like 'Combine silk and tweed for a timelessly elegant look - just like the new look McDonalds restaurant!'. And there's really nothing to say about the hiring of Justin Timberlake as their official spokesman, a rather nebulous position that seems to involve little more than him crooning 'I'm lovin' it' on their adverts - they don't even have to leak paparazzi photos of him and Cameron Diaz getting frisky at the drive-in. It probably took him fifteen minutes to record that barely-a-jingle, and he got paid something like $6m for it: probably the greatest hourly pay rate in the world. It's career McSuicide for him, and thus a total waste of money for them. To top it all off, 'I'm lovin' it!' is a terrible slogan, that can't convince anyone that the meals are eaten by anyone further up the fast-food career ladder than a burger flipper; and they still can't stop those urban myths about the exact contents of their mayonnise. |
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