I found this ad on YouTube. It is a commercial for McDonald's new collaboration with Xbox where customers can win an Xbox One with the purchase of food. Several things about this ad caught my eye. The first was the use of a racing celebrity to advertise the food. For one, I doubt he would ever actually eat McDonald's because it's not exactly the healthiest thing for an athlete to consume. Even so, he was shown eating a burger and fries, asserting that although he entered the restaurant as a customer, he would leave as a legend. This is only believable because the guy is presumably already a legend in racing, so nothing really changed for him. But to say that any regular customer will become legend after buying McDonald's? That's a stretch.
The word "Legend" is a great example of using vagueness to make a product seem more appealing. What is a legend? If anyone can become a legend, does it lose its meaning? Furthermore, the word doesn't seem to have any correlation to the actual food McDonald's is trying to sell: it's only attached to the celebrity and the prize of an Xbox One.
That was the other thing that I noticed -- McDonald's was really trying to convince customers that it would be really easy to get the Xbox. It's a one in a million chance, but they still make it seem like YOU will be the one to win. I thought that the collaboration with Xbox was interesting in that it even affected the color scheme of the whole ad. The celebrity's racing uniform was green, the packaging on the burger was green -- the overall effect was just green. At the end, you could put two and two together and realize that the logo for Xbox is green.
This ad was definitely appealing to the Need for Dominance. It was saying that anyone who buys McDonald's products will instantly be elevated to the title of legend. It also used Transfer/Association to make customers link the racing star, the food, and the feeling of winning an Xbox One. How do all these things connect? We'll never know.
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