Stupid ad of the week: McDonald's spontaneous playground

Advertising agencies work tirelessly day and night to come up with new ways to tell us consumers the same thing over and over again: "Hey, buy our shit. Don't you want to be happy?" Much of this cultural detritus goes unnoticed, but there are always those few ridiculous ads that...

By Ben Dayton

September 21, 2010

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Advertising agencies work tirelessly day and night to come up with new ways to tell us consumers the same thing over and over again: "Hey, buy our shit. Don't you want to be happy?" Much of this cultural detritus goes unnoticed, but there are always those few ridiculous ads that somehow make it through the brainstorming sessions of the world's copywriters that are just too bad not to notice, causing us to take pause and appreciate the stupidity of the human race. To that end, we bring you this new ad from McDonald's, which both wisely and stupidly avoids any mention of McDonald's food. Let's take a look.

The first guy to step on the playground thinks to himself: "Yeah! You know what, fuck it, I'm going to go slide down that slide."

This ad, which aired in Australia this past week, is made to appear spontaneously shot by a variety of amateur videographers that all had such a great time that they exchanged Facebook contacts and then uploaded their footage to some culturally-enlightened user-generated-content site where some philanthropic soul edited them into a cohesive whole, showing how everyone loves each other, and there's no war going on. In the process, Micky-D's presents itself as a place for cultural transformation, when in fact the only transformation you'll get from eating there is that of your bowels into quicksand.

My question is: where are all the homeless people? Hobos would be all over that thing. Sleeping in the tube crawl; crapping in the ball pool. Something tells me this place would be seething with drug dealers and pedophiles within hours.

Meanwhile, our intrepid hero gets off the slide ,walks over to his shoes and sees his boss looking at him with a sick smirk on his face. Boss: "We don't employ lunatics. You're fired."

Then the guy goes to McDonald's to drown his sorrows in a triple-bacon-cheeseburger binge. Mission accomplished.

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