Thursday, March 09, 2006

McDonald's Spurlock countermeasures

McDonald's continues to fight the fall-out from Morgan Spurlock's film Super Size Me. Their latest attempt is a web site created by one of their PR firms called "30 Day Dieters" that profiles some folks that ate only McDonald's for 30 days (like Spurlock) but lost weight (unlike Spurlock).

My questions is, couldn't McDonald's face its critics (like Spurlock) head on and profile these other folks (who disagree with Spurlock) on their own web site instead of creating what appears to be an 'independent' site? I've written about three of these people previously in this blog (McLes, Morgan, and Weaver). McDonald's could have done the same at mcdonalds.com. Instead they hired DCI Group which used a subsidiary, TCS Daily, to create 30daydieters.com.

It just seems so unnecessarily shadowy and deceptive. And don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not defending Spurlock; he practices bad science (if not outright deceit), but at least he used his own voice, not someone else's.

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