As someone who has worked on a fast food, ur, I mean Quick Service Restaurant account (as they fanatically prefer to be called), I know the QSR advertising world is very small. People bounce from Burger King to Carl’s Jr. to McDonald’s to Wendy’s—all in a matter of a few years. The cholesterol circuit we call it. Actually, we never called it that, but maybe we should have.
So I’m wondering if the new Wendy’s campaign for their Boneless Buffalo Wings is the result of recycled creative minds, or an actual belief permeating the QSR marketing world that there is nothing customers despise more than having someone sing Happy Birthday to them at a sit-down restaurant.
Carl’s Jr. was the first to stumble upon this theory when they attempted to convince us that sitting under the harsh neon lights of a local fast food joint, or eating in the front seat of our own car, is actually more comfortable than being in a restaurant. As the ad copy went—the worst thing about a restaurant burger, is the restaurant. This to the terrifying backdrop of those awful restaurant employees singing a peyote-fueled rendition of happy birthday to some more customer. So much better to just deal with the friendly fast food restaurant staff than to deal with this unwelcome kindness.
It’s an ingenious trick. Try to convince people that one of the biggest weaknesses of a fast food experience (the terrible service), is in fact a strength (As loyal readers will remember, this is the SWOT fallacy).
The latest Wendy’s commercial campaign makes exactly the same point. I can’t find the exact spot (look here for a sample :30 spot for the Asian Boneless Wings and you get the idea), but again the argument is that at a restaurant you have to pay for all these unpleasant accessories—one of which is, again, people singing Happy Birthday to some poor customer.
My question: Is it really such a horrible experience to have people sign happy birthday to you? Is this the worst thing that can happen to a person at a restaurant? Is there some kind of focus group where someone once said, “I love eating crappy food that will probably kill me, but what I really hate is when people sing happy birthday to me,” or is there one copywriter out there, bouncing through the cholesterol circuit, with an unhealthy vendetta against birthdays?
Most likely, this is another case of good-old fashioned plagiarism, which in the ad world is not a bad word–in fact, it’s how 90% of ad campaigns are born. Now let’s just see how long it takes Mickey D’s, JIB, and BK to follow suit…
Tags: carl's jr., Madvertising, review, wendy's
Is it wrong that this makes me hungry?