Ronald McDonald: Your Baby’s Daddy??

When thinking of the person most appropriate to determine the means for motivating your child’s academic performance, who comes to mind?

Never mind. The marketing geniuses at McDonald’s and the Seminole County, Florida School Board already picked Ronald McDonald.

That’s right. Even though Mickey D’s swore on a sacred stack of french fries to not market to elementary-age children, they blatantly co-opted report card distribution and plastered their kid-directed marketing program right onto the report card envelopes sent home with every student. What was the sell? The advertising scheme promised a Happy Meals as a prize for good grades, attendance and behavior. (Hold the irony, as junk food is equated with poor performance for all-of-the-above.) And not just the slightly-less-crappy Chicken Nuggets with Apple Dippers and low-fat milk ilk, but highlighted in the offer are Happy Meals with cheeseburgers, fries and soda pop.

Apparently the prize position hanging front-n-center on the fridge isn’t good enough for today’s young scholars. Instead, we trade high fat, high sodium, high fructose corn syrup in exchange for As.

What did the school get for selling-out their children’s health? Nada. McDonald’s simply paid $1700 bucks for printing up the advertisement envelopes.

Not only in breach of their FTC pledge to refrain from marketing to young children, the act of marketing low quality, high calorie food directly to kids in a public school environment is a breach of trust. The lowly plan cooked up by the school board and McDonald’s undermines parents’ rights to determine what’s appropriate for their children when it comes to advertising exposure and frankly, what’s an appropriate reward for a “job well done” above and beyond satisfaction and pride.

What does it cost to buy good grades from your child? 710 calories? 25 grams of fat? 930 milligrams of sodium? And at what price do you sell-out your child’s health?

Wanna tell McDonald’s to stop this nonsense? Our friends at Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood set up a one-step process to contact McDonald’s and tell them to stop advertising on report cards:

Pizza Hut and M&Ms need to get out of schools too, as well as sports drinks and soft drinks—all soft drinks, even artificially-sweetened diet.