Not McDonald's best effort

Emily Riley | August 29, 2007, 02:55 PM

I got my first viral ad on Facebook yesterday, and can’t say that I was overly impressed with it, although I hardly blame Facebook. It looked sort of like a friend request from a guy named Dan, with a nice little image and a note in my feed. When I clicked to check it out (knowing full well it was an ad from the start - not a bad thing,) I got to a microsite featuring “Chef Dan” from McDonalds. The layout and copy were advertising the rewarding careers at McD’s, and looked like the designer simply scanned in a pamphlet from 1986. There was little to interact with, although there was a small, seemingly unrelated quiz at the bottom asking “Who is your mentor?” Now, Dan really did seem to have a pretty cool job designing new 700 calorie burgers and the like (check out Card’s blog today) for the masses, but I am hardly the right target audience for a McDonald’s careers ad. Not only do I not want to be a chef there, but there was no incentive to forward it along or truly interact.

Facebook has actually done a good job of encouraging viral advertising on their site. Not only is their widget platform open to all takers, but their feed system is subtle and easy to manage if you don’t want to be bothered. In fact, in order to rid their widgets of opportunists, they have even taken steps to eliminate such things as automated emails or massive friending. Sadly, it doesn’t look like every advertiser knows how to take advantage of the process yet.