When you type "marketing" and "blog" into the internet, you don't get a whole lot of good news. Most of the links are about how to drive traffic to your site (pay for it) or how to increase your search engine ranking (pay for it or pay somebody to game the system). A few sites out there are for marketing professionals to trade information ... mostly about whether any of them will hire any of the rest of them.
But it's the very rare site that helps consumers learn what corporations are doing - fair and unfair - to get their money That's why I wanted to take a moment to recognize Consumerist.Com.
The Consumerist is the professionally-written blog owned by the Consumers Union, the parent company of Consumer Reports. It's dedicated to exposing the underside of consumer culture, customer service, and corporate malfeasance. See how I used all those words that start with C? I'm like that.
The Consumerist killed it again a couple days ago by unearthing the original Ronald McDonald ads. Here's the first one ever, from 1963:
The amazing thing is just how naked the objective of the ad is: appeal directly to children and promise them fun. The reality is that the corporation and its franchisees takes money from adults in exchange for food. Ronald McDonald isn't even selling a lie. He's selling an irrelevant lie. He's selling something that his stores don't carry to people who don't have any of their own money.
By comparison, Kraft's Sam Breakstone campaign looks positively philanthropic.
What do you think about the ethics of marketing to children? Do you think the Ronald McDonald of today is any better? Or is he just more subtle?
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