An ad campaign for McDonald’s in Europe. At least it’s different.
I have often wondered why McDonald’s still advertises in the traditional manner. We get it. You have hamburgers and chicken shapes and salads and fancy coffee and So Much More. You have a store about every five blocks. I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and forget you’re in business, and even if I did, I would start jonesing for your french fries within a few days and remember you again. If you did something like “we’re not going to buy our usual dozens of ads for a week and donate that money we would’ve spent to some kind of hunger campaign or research on cancer” or something, that would mean a great deal more to me than another ad with a remixed version of your latest jingle.
Incidentally, the above goes for any fast food chain, soft drink, or really anyone who advertises anything anywhere.
Some companies design their mascots from the get-go to look like a man in a suit. When I was a kid, the Putt-Putt mascot “Buster Ball” was a particularly solid example of this, with arms too short to hold a putter. As Happy Gilmore might suggest, he was too good for his home.
Here in America, Target and Kmart fight a bitter battle for the handful of consumers who have not welcomed their new Wal-Mart overlords.
In Australia, on the other hand, they are sister stores — Target is a little more upscale and Kmart still has their old 70s logo [freshened up a bit for the millenium, yes]. They are both owned by Australian retail giant Coles Myer.
I was waiting for someone to call them all on the carpet at once. I believe these are all published by actual companies. Someone might actually, or have at one point actually, put these program names on business cards or resumes.
I would like to point out that the next closest K-Mart store to the one I recently covered in these pages is in Commerce Township [MI].
Its road sign is a perfectly preserved relic from the olden days before the whole “Super Kmart” and “BIG Kmart” dichotomy. A huge, red “K,” leaning to the right, with huge, red, lowercase “mart” letters below it. If you get nostalgic for nighttime road signs in the 80s… um… here’s your sign? No, that’s not your sign.
