Take that corporate America

Whilst traversing the den of iniquity we call the internet I stumbled upon an intersting article by Maddox, a internet satirist (http://maddox.xmission.com/). Avoid this site if you are offended easily, in fact, its probably best if you just avoid this site altogether.

This article related to how much internet advertising doesn't work. Becasue copyright is fun I figured I should post his website up to give him credit.

Anyhow, below are the statistics:

Money spent on advertising courtesy of Adage.com

Internet traffic rankings courtesy of Alexa.com

--Note, the lower the ranking, the better the website--

• "KFC" spent $224, 515, 000 on advertising and ranked 33266 on the web


• "Wendy's Old Fasioned Hamburgers" spent $270,965,000 and was ranked 21984


• "Burger King" spent $336,271,000 with a ranking of 20483


• "Subway" Spent $218,685,000 and was 13937


• "Coca Cola" spent $154,360,000 and was ranked 12388


• "Pepsi" spent $170,115,000 and was ranked 9297


• "McDonalds" spent a whopping $548,250,000 on advertising and got an overall ranking of 6319


• And (drumroll please) Maddox and his "Best Page In The Universe" spent a grand total of Zero Dollars on advertising and was ranked 5892.

So my question is this, what are the big corporations doing wrong? How can it be that one abusive satirist can have more traffic than a website which spends over Five Hundred Million Dollars on advertising.

And more to the point, how can people get away with spending such obscene amounts of money trying to sell a slimy, greasy hamburger when there are still countries in the world with life expectancies not much higher than 38.

Don't fear though, every now and then one of these companies will do a "Fundraiser" to show how much they care about the world. However, even these fundraisers are sales gimmicks. If you look close enough you will see that in order to get the money (normally only a few cents from any purchase) to the charity, you have to buy a hamburger, or fries.

All the below statistics are from the McDonalds Websites. I thought it might be fun to screw them with their own stats.

So lets do the maths, last "Fundraiser" McDonalds did they pledged one dollar from every big mac sold. Now, a Big Mac costs $3.95, and assuming you buy fries and a coke which will take the value up to $5.50. So pledging one dollar from $5.50 gives you $4.50, now McDonalds serves about 47 million customers worldwide each day, and most of their promos are world wide any way, now the Big Mac would sell about 13 million units each day meaning that they will still draw in $58,500,000 dollars each day of the promo, and only give away, $13,000,000. Better than nothing I suppose. The promo ran for three weeks, during which time McDonalds saw an increase in the amount of Big Macs sold, ( though interestingly they never mention exactly what the increase was simply citing "...More than usual...").

And even their good samaritanship with the Ronald McDonald House Charity is a ploy to sell you more McDonalds. Sure they pledge a few million every now and then but that doesn't detract from the fact that it is a blatant promotional tool. The very name of it, Ronald McDonald gives it away. Not only do they use their mascot, they also use their name.

Hows this for a new promotional campaign:

Till my next rant, ta ta.