Ad of the Day: Taco Bell Launches Cold War Against McDonald's With Propaganda Imagery [Adweek] - http://www.adweek.com/news...
Mar 25, 2015
from
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Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart,
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From the article: "Egg McMuffins aren't just mediocre pastries stuffed with microwaved eggs, bright yellow cheese and ham product. They are a form of tyranny.
That, at least, is the upshot of 'Routine Republic,' a riveting and surreal new Taco Bell campaign from Deutsch. A year after the agency cheekily hired a bunch of guys named Ronald McDonald to celebrate the Mexican-themed fast-food chain's first foray into breakfast, the shots at the Golden Arches are barely masked.
In the three-minute centerpiece ad below, McDonald's affable but intrinsically creepy mascot is reimagined as a sunken-eyed Stalinist clown (though perhaps bearing closer resemblance to Mao). He rules over a small army of look-alikes and an oppressed proletariat in a decrepit, cloistered city with a beefy security apparatus. Run-of-the-mill breakfast sandwiches are his preferred method of subjugation."
- Stephen Mack
Via Kevin Fox (https://twitter.com/kfury...): "Ignore nutritional value of both sides and revel in the awesomeness of this Taco Bell Divergent/1984 McD attack ad: http://www.adweek.com/news..."
- Stephen Mack
This ad is amazingly well done, and I'd watch a feature-length movie like this. But, as the article says, "the frivolous McDespot comparison is also perhaps a touch insensitive, given, you know, the mass killings and other atrocities that marked the Stalinist and Maoist regimes."
- Stephen Mack
I agree that the commercial is well done! The only point it lost me was when the punk song started playing. It's such a canonical rebellious song that it felt like it didn't fit.
- Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart
But in light of the darkness of the "Stalinist and Maoist" themes, the ending was fun & light enough to bring the viewer back to reality.
- Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart
I dunno, I think it's in the same vein as all dystopian fiction, though. I don't think anyone would ever accuse, say, Orwell or Aldous Huxley or Suzanne Collins as being "insensitive" to victims of real totalitarian regimes. The other thing is that I think it's more of a parody of corporatocratic crony capitalist regimes more than of totalitarian communist police states—more like "Idiocracy" and less like the U.S.S.R.
- Victor Ganata
That's certainly one way to completely reinterpret "run for the border", though :D
- Victor Ganata
Hahaha!
- Stephen Mack
Nice!
- Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart