• by Tom Siebert , November 6, 2006

Last week, fast food restaurant chain McDonald's was the latest large corporation caught constructing fake blogs--or flogs--to promote the company or its products.

The revelation came in the final days of the chain's annual "Monopoly" contest--a promotional tie-in with the venerable game's maker Hasbro, in which customers collect and try to match property pieces in hopes of winning an assortment of prizes, up to one million dollars.

As part of the promotion, McDonald's created a pair of blogs--one inside a site that kept a running tally of the game's winners that was allegedly written by the 2004 million-dollar winner Marcia Schroeder, and another that claimed to be the creation of self-described "simple guy" "Stanley Smith," a doughy security guard from Joliet. In his profile, he wrote: "I have yet to complete one of my quests in life, winning the McDonald's Monopoly Game grand prize."

Stanley's blog includes a weekly series of YouTube videos that show the absurd extent he will go to in order to collect the Monopoly cards, hoping to acquire all four railroad properties.

Schroeder's blog--which has since been taken down, and as of late Friday, also was missing from Google cache--repeatedly referenced Stanley's blog as if it had been produced by a real person, and provided links to it. She also waxed effusively and relentlessly about McDonald's food quality and variety, as well as her quest to win this year's contest.

Representatives for McDonald's did not return phone calls. Kristin Zanini of JSH&A Public Relations in Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. confirmed that her agency did create the blogging strategy behind Schroeder and "Stanley Smith," and that Smith was a fictitious creation.

Zanini asserted, however, that Schroeder personally wrote all the entries on her blog, including the one that reads: "Some nights, we skip cooking dinner at home just to take a trip to McDonald's so we can play Monopoly. Thank goodness they have lots of variety on the menu to choose from." Zanini would not provide contact information for Schroeder, however, and attempts to independently track her down were unsuccessful.

Zanini said a portion of the online strategy was the work of the Chicago office of The Marketing Store, which describes itself on its Web site as "an idea factory" with 12 offices globally. Zanini added that the removal of Schroeder's blog was planned to coincide with the end of the Monopoly game, Oct. 30.

Although representatives didn't return phone calls, a short video on the site boasts: "We don't target consumers. We deliver work inspired by them."

The two McDonald's flogs were first exposed by the blog Consumerist.