14 DAY TRIAL // McDonald’s has taken an advert for McFries and turned it into something palpable – literally. In Switzerland, the fast food giant has so-called McFries pedestrian crossings, in what is another instance of intrusive marketing.
The moment the photo that also come attached to this article (via here) ended up online, voices already started to be heard about where this may be going. After all, it’s junk food we’re talking here.
By taking a portion of French fries and having it painted on a crossing, McDonald’s is literally inviting everybody into its world, even those who may be opposed to this type of food or who make a point of avoiding it, it is being said.
B.O.B (Big on Brands), for instance, puts this recent campaign on par with one developed by Unilever, in which the company can track down customers by GPS to their home and pay them a visit, should they win something.
Granted, the McDonald’s ad doesn’t even come close to that, in the sense that there’s no invasion of privacy to speak of, but it does raise some questions about the lengths some brands would go to to promote their products.
Instead of focusing on how this ad is pushing boundaries, StyleFrizz is wondering whether more caution shouldn’t be exercised when it comes to junk food. After all, we’ve all been hearing about how unhealthy it is.
“Visually catchy, this McDonalds pedestrian crossing can be seen in Switzerland. The country where everything is… well, slightly different,” StyleFrizz writes.
“Uniformity doesn’t seem to provoke the same worries in Switzerland, neither does junk… ahem fast food. Is there anyone from Switzerland reading these lines? Care to share a bit of your life philosophy with us?” the same e-zine further asks.
In saying so, the e-zine seems to be suggesting that such a campaign wouldn’t be possible in the US or the UK because of health concerns and how health groups would react to it.
In June this year, for instance, watchdog Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) threatened to sue the same McDonald’s if it didn’t instantly retire all the toys from its Happy Meals.
Offering kids toys in the kids’ menus was equal to luring them to junk food by the promise of a present, the group said at the time, for which reason it had decided to take legal action.
“Eating Happy Meals promotes eating habits that are virtually assured to undermine children’s health. McDonald’s marketing has the effect of conscripting America’s children into an unpaid drone army of word-of-mouth marketers, causing them to pester their parents to bring them to McDonald’s,” CSPI director was saying at the time.
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