How much can you really love McDonald’s?

By Cynthia Edwards

I thought I’d seen it all, on the subject of prurient advertising, until recently I noticed a new McDonald’s billboard. It pictured a breakfast meal with the headline, “I think you’re hot.” The double entendre surprised me so much that I felt I had to give McDonald’s the benefit of the doubt; that by some accident the Behemoth of advertising creative people and executives responsible for creating the company’s messaging didn’t get it themselves. Unlikely, I know, yet the theme just seemed too egregious for the brand that brought us Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar.

Then one day the billboard changed and I knew for sure. The next message depicted a hamburger lunch and the headline read: “I must have you now.” Two in row. It’s no error or coincidence. McDonald’s is running a campaign that makes their food a metaphor for a sex object. Is this what they mean by their new slogan, “I’m loving it?”

Advertising has long been one of my prime subjects for criticism, because its ubiquitous presence in our culture makes it an influence that must be watched and answered. Also, I’m in advertising myself. I know how it works and how advertisers think. My comments are not an indictment of the industry, which has an important part to play in the economy and has the same potential as any other industry to be used for good or evil. However, when evil comes into my living room uninvited or pushes itself in my face on a billboard as I drive along the public thoroughfares, hey—I’m going to push back.

The new McDonald’s billboards violate two of my most dearly held standards. The first, and most important, is that they pollute the spiritual environment with base thoughts aired in the sight of children, immature thinkers, and decent adults. Children, in particular, are susceptible to having their moral development retarded when the culture at large instills the notion that sleazy ideas constitute acceptable and normal speech. (It might pass in a court of human law, but it won’t get a toe-hold in the Court of the Heavenly King.) And when you harm or hinder the moral development of a child, you get dangerously close to millstone territory (MT 18:6).

There are plenty of other ads that equate a product with sex regardless of any logic. I know what you’re thinking—that sex sells, right? Perhaps for some—the immature thinkers listed above. This type of advertising obviously is intended to appeal to our basest instincts, and requires the least amount of sophisticated thought from its originators. What schoolboy can’t think up a dirty joke?

A television campaign for a herbal shampoo shows women in states of ecstasy out of all proportion to the actual experience of getting the grease out of their hair with a pleasant-smelling product. (I call it aroma-idiocy.) A commercial last year for AOL Broadband service featured Sharon Stone in a situation that made it clear she had been having sex with AOL’s cartoon icon. This was an outrageous, mind-bending move for a company that has been trying for years to promote how child-safe its online environment is.

A slightly different example was a recent billboard for a price-comparison web site that reached the nadir of crudity with the suggestion, “give retail prices the finger” and depicted—oddly, for a web site—a Yellow Pages-type image of ‘fingers doing the walking’ to their site.

Ads like these make me cringe with embarrassment, and think with distress of all the parents whose ten-year-olds will start imitating uncritically what they have seen and heard. Kids do not need this kind of influence in their lives. But no one puts ratings on commercials and billboards. It’s amazing what passes by the FCC anymore.

The second violation of my personal standards that McDonald’s and so many other advertisers are guilty of, after the violation of our moral air space, is the lack of intellectual fitness. Only the most depraved mind could honestly imagine a McDonald’s meal as a sex object. Double entendre is only witty when BOTH meanings fit the subject in some unexpected way. To use the device just for the purpose of introducing an indelicate or smutty overtone to the ad, without any actual relevance to the product’s attributes, simply points up how intellectually dull the advertiser must be.

The portrayal of workaday products in crude settings or as objects of sexual titillation for the sake of brand notoriety is just one example of the degrading of our culture. It matters because the level of vulgarity is rising daily and even infiltrating products that used to be family-friendly.

Unless decent people take note and speak out, we will become analogous to the frog that was put into a pot of warm water and had the heat gradually turned up on it. Our decency will boil to death in its own complacency.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (Philippians 4:8 )