• by Tom Hespos , February 8, 2005

While the Super Bowl ads are still fresh in everyone's mind, I wanted to discuss the online component of one of these ad campaigns, specifically McDonald's and their "Lincoln Fry" shtick.

The McDonald's ads concerning a french fry that bears a resemblance to the 16th president were cute. I got a good laugh out of them. Viewers were prompted to visit a Web site (lincolnfry.com) and interact with the Lincoln fry phenomenon. They can learn about when the Yahoo! auction will be held for the mysterious fry, download goodies like desktop wallpaper, IM icons, and iron-ons, and visit a blog that is supposedly written by the folks who "discovered" the Lincoln fry.

Does this strike anyone as a bit silly?

If you ask me, this concept could have been better executed if it lived in broadcast alone. The online portion seems like a tacky, last minute add-on to me. Does anyone really want the Lincoln fry hanging out on their desktop? (No doubt we'll hear about how many people downloaded the desktop wallpaper, icons, and iron-ons at some point. And I'm sure that a handful of site visitors might download this stuff just for kicks.)

It begs the question -- does McDonald's hope to convince the online population that this campaign is something more than an engineered publicity stunt? A blog discussing the Lincoln fry is a bit over the top. Upon clicking to visit the blog from the Lincoln fry Web site, one gets a warning that one is about to leave the McDonald's Web site, as if the Lincoln fry blog is some sort of independent entity that exists outside the realm of McD's control. Does McDonald's hope to make people think this is all real?

If so, it's a silly idea. And it's antithetical to what made the Super Bowl ad so funny in the first place - we enjoy making light of those ridiculous situations in which people find food items that resemble famous people, and we enjoy it more when some poor sap actually shells out good money for a Jesus tortilla or something similar.

But the Web component of this campaign seems to want to grant legitimacy to the whole thing. Wasn't the point of the Super Bowl commercial to poke fun at the whole idea? That's what I got out of it. One would expect online communications to continue in that vein, perhaps providing some content about how much money people have paid in online auctions for food that resembles religious figures or celebrities.

Instead, the online channel tries to legitimize the whole thing and to make it cool. I don't think the other media components of this campaign work very well with the broadcast component, which is the centerpiece of the effort.

As for how this came together at McDonald's, I can only speculate. However, the end product is symptomatic of a campaign in which the online and offline teams weren't synched up from a strategic standpoint. Instead of working with the broadcast ad, the online components take the concept off in a totally different direction, one that is hardly believable. (The blog community this morning is posting about how McDonald's has been "outed" for the blog component of this campaign.)

I'll concede that McDonald's will likely get a lot of traffic from its broadcast ads, but what does this do for the brand or for sales? I doubt folks are going to buy into the legitimacy of the Lincoln fry and flock to their local McDonald's to pick up extra orders of fries. Instead, they're more likely to ridicule the brand for trying to pass something manufactured off as something genuine.

I'm sure many of you will comment on the Spin Board that any publicity is good publicity, but I disagree. I think McDonald's blew a chance to make their brand more relevant to the younger folks who have finely tuned B.S. detectors and get kicks from ridiculing things like the Lincoln fry.