McDonald’s rips Jony Ive in tasty new ad for ‘the STRAW’

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Screen Shot 2017-02-16 at 15.40.32
This looks weirdly familiar...
Photo: McDonald's

Apple can barely manage a few days without someone else parodying or ripping off one of its iconic ads. The latest? McDonald’s, which just debuted a commercial for a product called “the STRAW” to market its forthcoming St. Patrick’s Day-themed Chocolate Shamrock Shake.

From the white backdrop to the earnest-sounding “person with a British accent,” there’s no doubt who the fast food chain is having some fun at the expense of.

The STRAW: McDonald’s Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal

McDonald’s apparently hired actual engineers to come up with the high-tech, J-shaped STRAW (short for “Suction Tube for Reverse Axial Withdrawal”).

The fast-food giant calls the STRAW a “limited-edition and utterly frivolous reinvention [that] lets guests enjoy both flavors of the new Chocolate Shamrock Shake (and yes, we truly had engineers design these).” The chocolate-mint shake is one of four new variations on St. Patrick’s Day classic. Other new flavors include Shamrock Chocolate Chip Frappé, Shamrock Hot Chocolate and Shamrock Mocha.

“It was a puzzling assignment but one with an ambitious goal,” said Seth Newburg, principal engineer and managing partner at NK Labs, one of two firms hired by McDonald’s for the STRAW project, in a press release. “From a physics perspective, it’s actually quite difficult to deliver a proportional amount of both chocolate and mint flavors with each sip. But that’s exactly what we did. It’s a marvel of fluid dynamics. Thanks Fibonacci sequence.”

McDonald’s also borrowed something else from Apple’s playbook: exclusivity. The STRAW will reportedly be in extremely short supply (Fast Company says only 2,000 of the milkshake-consumption devices will be distributed at first, although more could be produced if the STRAW proves to be a success).

Only a few participating McDonald’s restaurants are currently listed as potentially stocking the STRAW on a first-come, first-served basis. These things are going to be hard to get than AirPods!

No end to Apple parodies

As you might imagine, parodies of the oh-so-serious Jony Ive Apple spots are fairly common. Late last year, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert ran one to spoof Apple’s pricey Designed by Apple in California coffee table book.

A couple years before that, one by IKEA squeezed plenty of comic material out of describing a regular book in the way Apple does with cutting-edge tech. Ride-sharing service Lyft has had a go, too.

Ive’s “voice of god” video voiceovers aren’t the only Apple marketing spots to get spoofed, of course. A recent Sonos ad borrowed Apple’s sledgehammer-tossing “1984” imagery. Meanwhile, cloud-based collaboration service Slack “paid homage” last year to Apple’s audacious 1981 newspaper ad welcoming IBM to the personal computer industry, by doing the same to Microsoft.

In other words, none of this is new — although it does serve to remind us just how iconic Apple’s marketing techniques have proven!

Via: Apple Insider

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