Apparently You ‘Eat Like Olympians’ at McDonalds

McDonalds is setting an incredibly bad example with their barrage of commercials for the 2010 Olympics. It’s not surprising for an organization like McDonalds to provide sponsorship for the event but these commercials have crossed a line. The video above shows a series of spots for the Canadian airwaves (a similar set was shown for the US). It’s absolutely ridiculous for these amazing athletes to purport this body-destroying junk. It may be true that some like to eat McDonalds [and occasionally at best if they want to remain competitive]. But the athletes are setting a terrible example for millions of kids, world wide, who idolize them, as one blogger as noted from her personal experience.

There was one commercial that really bugged me: A coach talking to a kids ice hockey team. He said that they played like Olympians today, so today they eat like Olympians. Cut to the shot of them in McDonalds. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? This is just blatant. And I’m sure it’s a slap to the face to all the Olympic athletes that work so hard to train and take care of their bodies.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at 10:52 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  1. Apparently You ‘Eat Like Olympians’ at McDonalds | World Global - February 24, 2010
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2 Responses to “Apparently You ‘Eat Like Olympians’ at McDonalds”

  1. Jamie Harrington says:
    February 24, 2010 at 10:47 am

    YES! That’s exactly how I felt! I’m not saying DON’T feed your kids McDonalds or whatever. (Although, I could make a strong argument for that) I just don’t want my kid to think McDonalds is where these athletes that work their butts off for years and years work, ya know?

    Reply
    • Arnav Shah says:
      February 25, 2010 at 3:08 pm

      Thanks for your reply. The thing is companies like McDonalds have every incentive to put out these ridiculous advertisements as long as they can get away with it. But if we can change the cost-benefit ratio of that, then McDonalds will (and should for their interests) change their behavior. So one way to accomplish this, though it seems unlikely, is for misleading commercials to be illegalized (and of course have an enforceable penalty). Another way, which does stand a better chance, is to have this affect McDonalds’ reputation. The fact that McDonalds serves unhealthy food doesn’t do any damage because this is fairly well known. But if McDonalds gets a bad rap of manipulating children, enough to affect sales, then they’ll certainly reconsider their commercials (as it is in their interest to do so). As I noted in another post (http://blog.sonicans.net/industries-and-interests/), companies pretty much behave only to further their own interests.

      Reply

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