mcdonalds

Crowdsourced Burger Photography

A fast food giant faces a lawsuit because their burgers don’t look like they do in the marketing. It’s not the first time.

Marketing photograph showing Burger King's "Whopper" burger. — Did you ever see a Whopper™️ that looked like this? Me neither.

If I ran a fast food franchise affected by this kind of legal action, do you know what I would do? I’d try to turn it back around into marketing exercise with a bit of crowdsourcing!

Think about it: get your customers to take photos and send them to you. For every franchisee that uses a photo you take, you get a voucher for a free meal (redeemable at any outlet, of course). And where it appears on the digital signage menus they all seem to have nowadays, your photo will have your name on it too.

Most submissions will be… unsuitable, of course. You’ll need a team of people vetting submissions. But for every 50 people who send a blurry picture of an unappetising bit of sludge-meat in a bun; for every 10 people who actually try hard but get too much background in or you can see the logo on their clothing or whatever; for every 5 people that deliberately send something offensive… you might get one genuinely good candid burger picture. Those pics get pushed out to franchisees to use. Sorted.

Now if anybody complains that you fake your photos you can explain that every one of your food pictures was taken by a real-life customer, and their name or handle is on the bottom of each one. Sure, you get to vet them, but they’re still all verifiably genuine pictures of your food.

And you probably only have to do this gimmick for a year and then everybody will forget. Crowdsourcing as a marketing opportunity: that’s what I’d be doing if I were crowned Burger King.

Becky falls off a chair in McDonalds

Originally from a tweet.

In case anyone needs a good laugh today here’s me falling off a stool in McDonald’s that a friend found on the CCTV

Also available on YouTube.

McDonalds Let the Internet Create Their Own Burgers and Guess What Happened

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

McDonalds had to know what they were doing. The New Zealand branch of the franchise launched its “Create Your Taste” campaign with a special promotion: Design your own burger and get free fries and a soft drink for your trouble. Not a bad idea in theory, but then there’s the part where they let everyone share their hideous creations. There was no way that someone somewhere at the company didn’t speak up at one point and say “Hey uh, you know that the internet is just going to create the most offensive and terrible burgers possible, right?”

Tristan Cooper (Dorkly)

Quarter Life Crisis

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.

Claire wrote:

I’ve been having feelings of general worthlessness and pointless recently, which Dan has dubbed my “quarter life crisis”. Basically, I’m 20, and I’m supposed to be all adult, and useful to the world. I didn’t want to ever grow up. I have very little to show for my twenty years of life, I don’t do anything much that affects the world at large or even my own little world. I feel like I’ve floated through life so far, like a piece of driftwood, or an electron – taking the line of least resistance all the way.

This is going to change. As I said to Dan yesterday, it’s all worthless and pointless when all I do is think about how worthless and pointless it all is. So, bored of being a whining teenager, and wanting to justify my own existance, I’m going to DO things. Less talk, more doing, thinking, travelling, experiencing.

I’ve begun to enjoy working at McDonalds, sadly, but i still need a job where I can earn more for doing less so that I don’t feel constantly tired.

Rant of the day: Bruises, scrapes and burns.
Not a work-day goes by where I don’t injure myself in some way. Some of this, I admit, could be put down to general clumsiness on my part but I know people who’ve been there longer than I who have more scars. The fry station – hot fat, hot baskets, hot fries, hot metal everywhere, and I have to move fries about quickly and accurately. The floor – always slippy for some reason, my “regulation” flat bottomed shoes have little grip. The spatulas – metal, sharp, hot. I have a bruise on my leg from turning too quickly and knocking “Archie” (the fry machine) when I’d taken off the guards to clean him. The boiling water that comes out of the tap for tea. It hurts. There’s no way to keep safe, especially when you have to work so quickly. But, they put “Wet floor” signs and “Careful, it’s hot” everywhere, so it’s all ok.

But as I said. Less talk. More do.