McDonald’s: NIN Ripoff or Homage?
Via the “You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice” blog: the design on the left appeared on the wall at a McDonald’s in the UK. Speculation runs rampant as to whether this was a blatant ripoff of NIN’s “The Fragile” or whether someone on the staff that came up with the interior design was just making a reference. More images can be seen at Echoing the Sound, the NIN fan forum where this story first appeared.
I like to think that this was an homage, a fan sneaking his favorite band into McDonald’s for fellow fans to recognize. Then again, maybe it was the night before deadline and some desperate designer picked up the CD nearest to his Mac and this happened. What do you guys think?
Skerror adds: “I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing was in the next generation of corporate tricks tho…maybe they start paying people to subvert their own brand/culture just to drum up interest. Then people go to McDonald’s and take cellphone pics and upload them saying, ‘Look at how well the underground has infiltrated McDonald’s. We are winning the war. Is anyone else hungry?'”
January 10th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Funny that this came up just when I came across this:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/29/minor-threat-vs-nike.html
Same kinda thing, only someone didn’t think it was clever….
January 10th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
This reminds me:
someone at Apple is a Front 242 fan (make sure you read the entire page)
January 10th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Shay… now THAT is a clever homage. I love it! I like Macs a little bit more than I did before now! Thank you for that.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
reminds me of this mcdonald’s rolling stone rip off as well:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2061/2179850329_20fee669f9.jpg
January 10th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Haha, awesome Shay! I looked for “bait the line” around that Finding Nemo image, but then I realized that probably didn’t happen in a Disney kids movie.
As for McD/NIN…if it was just a single poster at a single UK McDonald’s…I’d say it was likely an homage or deadline cheat. I wouldn’t be surprised if this type of thing was in the next generation of corporate tricks tho…maybe they start paying people to subvert their own brand/culture just to drum up interest. Then people go to McDonald’s and take cellphone pics and upload them saying, “Look at how well the underground has infiltrated McDonald’s. We are winning the war. Is anyone else hungry?”
January 10th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
SKERROR…. I didn’t even think of that. Wow. Sounds like something out of Pattern Recognition!
January 10th, 2008 at 6:57 pm
I haven’t eaten at a McDonald’s in a decade now…mainly cause their “food” makes me ill beyond words…but in that time you’ve seen them take great efforts to improve their look and corporate image. NIN isn’t some underground band with a handful of followers…it’s pretty much a part of pop culture just as much as McDonald’s…so it’s nothing new for such well known brands to borrow ideas from one another. I think this is more of a case of “Don’t take yourself too seriously” than anything malicious…cause if you do the math I’m sure many of McDonald’s corporate suits were the college kids with NIN stickers on their Jeep.
@Skerror…would that be all that new of a tactic though? Look at the use of once rather subversive and multi-layered songs as promo songs to sell cars…or in the case of NIN’s last album promotion the use of Viral Game strategies to make the album and ole’ Trent appear subversive and deep. Halo 2 used a similar strategy to drum up hype and sales…no shock to see big companies like McDonald’s do the same now. I think once you reach a certain point in pop culture notoriety you automatically cash in on whatever culture you know just to stay alive.
January 10th, 2008 at 8:28 pm
Tequila: I think why this could be different and the next tactic in the age old struggle between consumers and advertising, is that I’m not seeing any evidence that McDonald’s and NIN worked together on this. Was Trent complicit in this? Did he get paid and he’s not saying? I don’t think so. They could be trying to make it sound like they’ve got some “rogue” designer monkey-wrenching them from the inside doing Banksy-style shit. It could be a way of corporatizing the rising anti-corporate wave. Hehe…it’s the fact that McDonald’s corporate suits are the ex NIN college kids that has me worried :)
January 12th, 2008 at 1:33 am
[…] Coilhouse » Blog Archive » McDonald’s: NIN Ripoff or Homage? wow. coming next, a McYearZero ARG? hunt around toilets for hidden cheese burgers ?! (tags: NIN McDonalds marketing copyright) […]
January 12th, 2008 at 6:55 am
@ Skerror: “They could be trying to make it sound like they’ve got some “rogue” designer monkey-wrenching them from the inside doing Banksy-style shit. It could be a way of corporatizing the rising anti-corporate wave.”
Could be though one may be giving McDonald’s too much credit there. With the ranks of artists getting involved in advertising coming from a generation raised on 80’s and 90’s pop culture and music on all fronts…this was bound to happen. The old guard is fading fast and ultimately they still need to appeal to their target demographic…who knows maybe it’s time to do away with the idea corporations are a bad thing and embrace them so fully that we drown them in our collective “love”.
First sign of the end times that’d be, eh? :D
January 12th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Tequila: I hear you on that and I thought maybe we could all embrace the big corporations and build a future together. There’s nothing inherently evil about them or anything…but they are set up to ooze their way into anything that nets them more attention and their shareholders more money. McDonald’s is now this completely sociopathic amoeba creature with a whole mythos behind it. They got a clown, hamburglers and shit, games, toys, they “love to see us smile” and they are trying to form this fucked-up emotional bond with us, they try to promote healthy lifestyle with their salads, and now they want to be our partners “against the man” and they want to help us fight global warming. I just don’t think it will ever be a healthy or beneficial relationship for us to throw our chips in with corporate power as it currently stands….it’ll be more like that relationship that guy has in that movie where he falls in love with the blow-up doll.
The big worry seems to be that if we fight back and try to put McDonald’s back where it belongs (which is a convenient place to get OK food in a hurry)…we’ll be taking jobs away from people and slowing economic growth. I don’t think that’s true if you believe in human creativity. Nobody is going to forget about McDonald’s if they don’t have constant reminders in the media…we’ll still be driving by them every day, eating there during lunch hours, and taking kids there to play in the playland. I just think they need to quit with all their ephemera garbage and put most of their advertising budget into fighting global starvation or something…they might even make MORE money that way.
January 13th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Ugh. Ripoff. This really does remind me quite a lot of that Minor Threat vs Nike shit storm that hit the web a while ago, only NIN is more mainstream.
My two cents about “subverting the system” or “winning the war” with something like this: I think it’s important to keep in mind that at the end of the day, said system exists only to feed itself. The belly of the beast is a great equalizer. Once something that previously existed outside of the marketing world goes down the ad pipe, no matter how interesting or unique, it becomes just another bile-soaked source of fodder, flotsam, or fuel to perpetuate said system. It is denatured, declawed.
No doubt, ad content can be quite beautiful and enlightening (I myself enjoy looking at vintage ads from the turn of the last century)… but in my opinion, not when their aesthetic is so blatantly and dishonestly appropriated from independent sources.
Viva Bill Hicks.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
@Skerror…solid points. A level of laziness does exist with people in relation to a company like McDonald’s. Since we’ve all essentially grown up with it the emotional bond is forged from the Happy Meal on. So to really try and see it in a negative light is tough…even with films like Super Size Me or the statistics about just how bad that food is for kids. At some point that has to change…we can’t let another generation of kids grow up thinking the advertising they do is harmless…I mean if a smoking cartoon camel is a bad role model then a clown who hocks artery clogging food should be too.
@Mer…”not when their aesthetic is so blatantly and dishonestly appropriated from independent sources.”
That’s the heart of the beast though…I wonder if it’s even possible to work in advertising on any level and stay honest…original maybe but honesty seems to cancel out any benefits advertising has.
and yes…Viva Bill Hicks!
Have either of you seen the new Converse TV ads? They’ve worth checking out if you haven’t…kind of a surprise. They’re funny but they also make you want to hit your head on a table.
January 14th, 2008 at 3:27 am
Definitely ripoff. The use of the same photo may be legal if it’s from an imagebank such as Corbis or Getty, in example and NIN didn’t buy the exclusive right to use it, but the same graphical grid? The chopped logo? The very similar (if not identical) font?
RIPOFF.
Sadly, in advertising it happens all the time. Just recently, Coca Cola ripped off Rathergood.com for an ad… the worse part is that the client ends up looking like a copycat while in reality it’s the advertisement agency’s fault for not checking that their art directors are ripping off people’s idea. After all, with internet it’s easy for an graphic designer or a creative to see a good ad made in India and copy it thinking people won’t notice… luckily, with internet there’s also much more probability of being caught ;-)
If you’re interested in other “coincidences” check out Coloribus… an excellent archive of ripoffs.
January 14th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I guess what gets me the most is the sheer volume and shallowness that is the current state of advertising. I don’t think that advertising NEEDS to be a bile spewing machine. Maybe if the big companies put down the Red Bull for a minute, stopped thinking in terms of fiscal quarter bottom lines, looked inward, and started refocusing on innovation instead of manufacturing phony materialistic needs…then they might be able to spin the whole advertising versus consumers dynamic around. My hope is that we’ll see the day when companies put out like 1 or 2 giant, cinematic, well-produced ads a year…like “state of the company” addresses. They could drop them like the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey and then put them on a youtube style site where consumers could word-of-mouth flock to them. For that sort of thing to happen though, I think we still really have to reshape our education system first…the status quo as is still seems to be an attention craving kindergartener. Everybody’s screaming “Look at me!”.
Yes! Long live Bill Hicks! He’s in my “what made me weird?” file for sure…even though I think it’s far weirder to NOT like Bill Hicks.
January 18th, 2008 at 6:32 am
Bit late to this one, but this happened to a friend of mine – a bedroom animator and singer in an unsigned band, who decided against all advice to try to take on Coca Cola over copyright infringement.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=hcFFWKcgXCA
End result? Well, long story short, they won. Coke settled out of court (undisclosed amount, unfortunately), and removed all the offending advertising. Nobody could quite believe it, but David truly kicked Goliath’s arse on this one.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6289933.stm
February 4th, 2008 at 2:28 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q16KpquGsIc