In the waning days of the Bush administration, McDonald’s France decided it was finally time to get on the Obamania bandwagon and start promoting their burgers as pure American.
You might have thought that that’s how they were promoted all along, but during the dark side of the last eight years the emphasis was on how integrated McDo (its nickname in France, pronounced Mac-Dough) was into French and European society, culture, and agriculture. Someone would pick on the company as being an arm of American anti-environmental, anti-nutritional, anti-Old Europe imperialism and McDonald’s’ PR wheels would start spinning to say how French, European, and important for the local economy they truly were.
As with all American multinationals, McDonald’s is constantly trying to figure out how to be both local and American at the same time. This month they unrolled an ingenious marketing campaign that I bet every American multinational operating in Europe wishes their ad agency had come up with first.
I recently caught up with the ad in the Paris metro.
The tag line reads Le goût de l’Amérique revient!, meaning “The taste of America is back!” and by extension “America is palatable again” and “It’s alright to like America again.”
McDonald’s has always been a smart advertiser. “Happy Meal” was a stroke of genius. How can anyone refuse a kid a happy meal, no matter what’s in it? Hey, I recently paid 75 euros ($100) for a meal in Paris and I wasn’t that happy.
“Le goût de l’Amérique revient” is another great McDonald’s slogan because it works on so many levels—or at least two: the one that despises and mocks America and the one that admires and envies America.
In a clear reference to the change in leadership in the White House, it tells consumers both “Yeh, we hated the policies of those Bush years as much as you did” and “Hey guys, we truly are a true reflection of cheery, hopeful, multicultural America after all, so if you want to be on the right side of history you better come in for a Big Tasty.”
Big Tasty is the special inaugural burger that has been brought back for the occasion, limited time only, presumably as long as Obama’s ratings remain attractive. But the product truly doesn’t matter. The slogan’s the thing.
The product is clearly secondary, otherwise the beef in the image of the Big Tasty wouldn’t resembles yesterday’s coagulated sesame chicken from an American Chinese take-out. At least that’s the impression when seen in a large-format metro ad.
But maybe the grotesque nature of the Big Tasty image is actually McDonald’s France’s up-yours to the left-wing, anti-American, slow-food intelligentsia, a kind of “Come on, you know you want it, it’s American, you just put on your high French airs and say you don’t, but admit it, you love all this American stuff, its the kind of food that people who voted for Obama eat!” And while the U.S. government hiked the tariff on Roquefort so as to make caviar cheaper to import then the famous French blue cheese, McDonald’s threw two layers of European-made American cheese onto its Big Tasty as an added twist of the knife.
On the other hand, maybe it actually does taste like yesterday’s coagulated sesame chicken. Nevertheless, it’s a brilliant slogan.