EXCLUSIVE: McDonald's Promotes Monopoly Game With Flogs
4railroads follows "Stanley Smith," obsessed with getting all four railroad pieces. The site also boasts a series of cinema verite videos purporting to document Stanley's exploits.
Mcdmillionwinner is supposedly written by Marcia Schroeder, the 2004 Monopoly winner. She's prone to such statements as, "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." (we're linking to the Google cache text version, the real one has been pulled but was here)
The blogs are supposed to be unrelated, but the images were hosted on the same server, 4railroads.com.
While Stanley's blog URL is 4railroads.blogspot.com, the URL 4railroads.com redirects to Marcia's blog.
A JSH&A released press release from Oct 19 notes, "For an inside look at how previous winners are reaping the MONOPOLY awards and to see just how far consumers will go to win big at McDonald's, visit http://www.4railroads.com."
However, nowhere on either blogs is there any notification that these are official McDonald's blogs. Besides, of course, the completely asinine body copy.
We expect Mickey D advertising to be horrible. But it should at least provide the courtesy of identifying itself as an ad, instead of trying to pretend to be user-generated content.
This is a test using rich text formatting and html links. It's the generic "company" ad that should appear on all posts with the Company category if they don't have an ad attached to a specific company.
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Comments:
Nah, it seems to be JSHA.
They certainly have the smell of flogs (and, um, kind of lame ones), but the fact that they're on the same server seems sort of underwhelming, since they're both BlogSpot blogs.
The sad thing is that they never learned their lesson a few years ago, when they got caught flogging. Anyone remember the Lincoln Fry blog debacle?
The 4railroads flog has diabled comments; I'm really not surprised.
Torts: They actually both shared images on the same image host but with only the (imageless) google cache existing its unverifiable at this point.
Also, check the source on both blogs where you'll find commented hidden gems, including Stanley's reference to Marcia's blog:
Found this blog from the 2004 Million-Dollar winner. So cool, its like training with Yoda if you can decipher the code..
Wtf? Training with Yoda? Deciphering the code?
Oh that's right, Stanley is a random internet weirdo just like you and me. We all talk like that.
I have a deep seated hatred for all McDonald's advertising. I especially hate the radio ads that run incessantly in my local market ("That's French for beep" et al.) and make me dive for the stereo in my car to change the station. It does not surprise me that the company that came up with those forms of torture would actively use flogs. I still say that anyone that advocates or runs a flog should be beaten severely.
Ah - that makes sense now. Thanks for the clarification.
Some day, the PR people will hire the necessary high school student to flog well. And then we will simply have to recognize them from the fact that they sound exactly like PR people rather than only from the fact that they have PR people's tech skills.
Stanley's is not even a well-written PR hack job... more like something the intern came up with in 10 minutes. What trips me out are his generic likes--Star Wars and the first three hair metal bands they could come up with. And you don't have links to REAL railroad info just because that's what you're collecting. It's like a Chicago Cubs fan linking to a page of cute zoo bear pictures.
You would think about the debacle of the insider ripping off the game pieces, McD would leave well enough alone - or even better, drop the whole monopoly thing ...
McD's wouldn't happen to be Edelman clients would they?