I gotcher depressing news for the day right here.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when half the Internet was laughing over McDonalds' new "I'd Hit It" hamburger ads? Every blog-pundit from here to Peru was smugly snickering over McDonalds' attempts to be cool and "with it" by using the latest street slang, somehow not realizing that "I'd hit it" does not mean "I would like to purchase and consume that sandwich" so much as "Yeah, I'd fuck her."

So last week, I had dinner with some friends who will remain nameless in order to protect some identities, and one of the people there was a guy I don't see often, the significant other of a good friend of mine. This not-often-seen significant other works for a prominent advertising firm, and toward the end of the evening, we were discussing people's careers, and sort of snickering at him for being part of the Great Marketing Machine, and somehow the "I'd Hit It" ad came up.

And he said "That? Oh yeah, that was totally deliberate. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they did it on purpose. It was a viral marketing strategy to get as many people as possible talking about McDonalds in their blogs, and searching for McDonalds advertising online."

He himself wasn't involved with the ad — it was created by another wing of his company — but he says it was well-known within the company that the whole thing was a conscious put-on. Part of the strategy involved having a company employee establish a fake blog which existed solely in order to break the "Oh my God, look at this ad" news. Considering that most of the blog entries I've found running this story point back to this link, which is where I first saw the story when a LiveJournaler pointed to it, and that the blog in question consisted largely of advertising and pop-culture news, and that the blog suddenly no longer exists, I'm assuming that it was the fake blog in question.

Why would McDonalds, or an associated ad company, want everyone on the Internet to think McDonalds is run by idiots? Because there's no such thing as bad publicity, and when everyone's talking about your company, no matter what they're saying, that's supposedly good. (Tell that to the folks at Enron and Arthur Anderson…)

But yeah, while I didn't link to it because everyone else was, I did point out the "I'd Hit It" ad to everyone at work, and now I feel like a corporate dupe. Not that it matters — I neither ate nor sought out inanimate, edible sexual partners at McDonalds before the ad campaign, and I still don't — but I feel successfully manipulated, and almost as slimy as if I had engaged in improper activities with a hamburger.

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EDIT: As theferrett points out, that blog is now back up, so you can judge for yourself whether it's a fake. Yeah, there are entries dating back to the middle of last year, but I can backdate entries here too, and make it look like my journal's been around longer than it has. I'm not finding a lot of commentary on any posts other than the McDonald's ad one, so it's hard to prove that those entries were around all along and not just thrown up all at once. Nonetheless, Mr. Ad Guy didn't claim this particular blog was the one in question, that's just a theory of mine. Still, I admit the fact that it's still available is a wrench in that particular hypothesis — when I checked it out this afternoon and got a "no such website" page, I got all eureka-y for a minute, but now I'm not as sure. Still. I trust Ad Guy's word more than I trust Anonymous Blogger Dude, and I still find it impossible to believe that there wasn't a single ad rep at this company who knew what "I'd hit it" meant.

I'm-a feelin': disappointed