It’s less sick-inducing if you tell yourself that it’s only a “cake” in that it functions as a cake and is shaped like one - IOW, that underneath that layer of McNuggets are more McNuggets; no actual cake or frosting is used.
McDonald’s might hate black people, but apparently black people love McDonald’s (short scene from “Blackbelt Jones”). 
All these replies, and still no “niggardly” joke?
Yeah, I haven’t seen one of those in a coon’s age.
Probably, but that has nothing to do with this thread. 
With all due respect, OP, your thread title is a generalization.
Maybe I’m examining it too closely, but I think that before a commercial even airs, it will have gone through every imaginable sociological/psychological test available, and if anyone finds anything objectionable at all, it’s for sure that it will have been considered already.
Q
Niggardly? Please.
Awe. Some.
I don’t care who you are, that’s funny right there.
No actual chicken either!
When I see the McDonald’s commercials I think of this from the movie Drop Squad, about a black ad exec (Eric LaSalle) that sells out.
You’re an idiot.
Wow. I always thought that McDonaldland stuff was aimed at stoners.
There’s the one with the soccer team. The team that won the big game is waving its trophy aloft and jeering at the disconsolate losing team on the other side, but then some of the losing team’s parents arrive with McDonald’s food. The losing team perks up and begins laughing and carrying on, while the winning team looks jealously at the McDonald’s food and sullenly lets the trophy slump to the ground.
Did you maybe mean “crooning”?
There is a Hispanic centered ad where someone is walking through the neighborhood with an open box of McNuggets as people dance by to a Latin beat and grab a McNugget. So according to McDonalds; black people rap and sing R&B and dance hip-hop, Hispanics dance Salsa in the streets (ala West Side Story) and white people get married and have dinner parties. This says to me that white people are boring, ipso facto, McDonald’s actually hates white people.
I think just about everyone lives near one. But people probably just go to the closest one at the moment. It’s not like, “Oh, I don’t like that McDonald’s. The one in our neighborhood has much better food.”
Exactly. They know when kids watch TV.
I have a friend who acted in a Spanish language McDonald’s ad that aired on Univision. She just said the same kind of things like in the adult ads in English. No stupid narrative, though. So the one in the OP is more insulting our intelligence than anything, as noted above.
Lick my shoes.
If McDonalds was offering McFortiez malt liquor in “selected” neighborhoods, the OP might have a point.
That’s how I took it too. I found it mildly amusing.
I don’t know if I’d feel any differently about this ad if I were black, but I don’t think I would. Looking at the YouTube video again I note that the couple in the commercial are attractive, stylishly dressed, and have a nicely decorated home. They don’t look or behave in any way like clowns or performers in a minstrel show.
They’ve been going more “urban,” but for once, that’s not code for “black people.” There’s plenty of hipsters and skaters and yes, black people in these ads.