EXCLUSIVE: McDonald’s Promotes Monopoly Game With Flogs Image courtesy of
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.
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.
