It's a Wonderful Lifé

So, one of the more recent advertising campaigns that has been nearly impossible to not notice around L.A. recently (and the world, I presume) is McDonald's new McCafé line of coffee products. McDonald's has chosen to inform us of their wonderful new products with all the discretion and subtlety of a Micheal Bay movie: there's been bus ads, newspaper ads, magazine ads, bus stop ads, billboards, and a 4 story tall McCafé mocha drink busting out of a building I drive past on the way to my internship.

And of course, the TV and radio spots. The TV ads are my favorite - they usually tell people to "McCafé your Day!", which usually involves them buying one of McD's new McCafé drinks and (surprise, surprise) the product vastly improves the lives of those who purchased it.

I especially like the ads where people are doing lame, boring chores or work and then they buy a drink and McD's adds an accent mark and that makes it fun or classy - commute become commuté, chore becomes choré. Ignoring the grammatical pitfalls of such reckless use of the accent mark, I think McD's is also saying something very insulting to its customers.

Essentially, they are like: "your life sucks, and the only way to add a pitiful amount of joy into it is to suck on one of our caffeine-loaded, sugar-filled, 300+ calorie mocha drinks while you execute the same boring routine you do every day, giving you a moment of happiness while you plod along to an painful death brought on from Diabetes from drinking too many McCafé mocha drinks".

Maybe I'm overreacting a bit about it, but it realy seems strange that McD's shows boring people doing boring things while drinking their new McCafé drinks. What happened to the clasic "i'm lovin' it" campaign that showed snazzy hipsters eating from McD's Dollar Menu because they are too poor to buy better food? Now THAT was an ad campaign I got behind.

This new thing is just lame. Or should I say, it's lamé.