The Hootie ad I posted right above came out in 2005 (I think), so that fits with this trend of the time. No way any company could do that ad today on cable TV.
Agreed - that’s definitely a CP&B ad (they were BK’s ad agency from 2004-2011). Note that both the creepy King and the Subservient Chicken have cameos in it.
Dang - I just rewatched and, yep, they are both there. I do love the Hootie ad though.
True, and the replacement, McDonald’s Edgelord, was also less fun.
Go tell Jack Box, CEO of Jack in the Box. please, I’d sure love to see no more of their commercials.
To be fair, Jack isn’t a typical clown. He’s got a weird, oversized ping pong ball head. Not traditional clown makeup.
I was never so much scared by them, just confused. Why do they look like that? Why is that supposed to be funny? I get the oversized clothes and mismatched patterns but the makeup was the thing that threw me.
Check out the documentary Killer Klowns from Outer Space. It was marketed as fiction, but that’s because the truth is too dangerous.
I haven’t seen a Jack In The Box commercial for years, and it’s not like I don’t watch TV.
That said, I find Jack Box to be a special case due to his history. Many years ago the company ran a series of commercials where they literally blew up the clowns where you would pull up and order. The idea was to appeal to a more grown-up clientele. At the time, a lot of young adults still remembered playing with real jack-in-the-boxes in early childhood, so the overall effect of the mascot was presumably more childish, at least IMO.
From there they went to commercials showing a group of cool twenty-somethings who are shown waiting for their “Alpha Leader” to taste the food and pass judgment.
Still later they reintroduced the clown as Jack Box, now the company CEO and dressed like an adult exec below the clown head. Now he appeared in more or less adult, if surreal situations. I thought it rather creative, though I have no idea if it was successful.
IIRC all of this happened over many years.
As a way to distance themselves from the big E. coli outbreak.
My ex worked on that case and I saw the photos. They are in my brain forever next to Daniel Pearl.
She was horrifically burned and they offered her a laughably pitiful amount.
She deserved every penny.
There’s a difference between “how bad” and “whose fault”.
But this is an ongoing argument nobody will concede.
Back to PO -
Does any remember a very short-lived attempt post-Ronald to be hip and relevant with a character that looked a bit like every generic cool jazz piano player with sunglasses and a crescent-moon for a head, as “Mac Tonight”? Sort of encouraging, I suppose, late night bar hoppers to consider a quick snack on the way home…
Didn’t seem all generic to me, seemed based off of Stevie Wonder…
I thought Ray Charles.
That was the time I stood in line with, my mother-in-law at the time, to get an autograph from her favorite NASCAR driver Bill Elliot. He drove the McD car and they had a special Mac the Knife paint job for the race and she bought a Mac the Knife T-shirt for him to sign.
Mac Tonight; the character’s name was a play on the song “Mack the Knife.”
Close enough after all these years.
Do they still have Jack-in-the-Box antenna balls? You can take the head off of a Ken doll and replace it with a Jack ball and you’ll have a Jack Box doll.