My husband pointed this ad out on the way into work yesterday and it's been puzzling me ever since. Does it legitimately not make sense or is it completely obvious and I'm just not seeing it?

I have a few possible theories about this ad but none seem completely right.

The first is a drink to match the thing that you eat, except the relationship between thirst and food doesn't seem to make sense here. A McChicken would probably make you much thirstier than a Salad, and who wants to drink Coke with a parfait?

Another suggestion is some sort of value system, IE a Salad is better than a McChicken, hence you get a bigger drink, but I don't think you'd argue with me if I said this cannot be true. Who would claim a Salad is better than a McChicken, or at the very least, that a Salad was preferable to a Parfait? Even if you were basing your values system on health, the healthiest health nerd would agree that a Parfait is much more enjoyable than a Salad and probably not that much worse for you if it's worse for you at all, so let's all just call a spade a spade and agree that the Salad is the worst. Yet it's got the biggest drink.

Perhaps the food names are the new names of the sizes? You know, like "McChicken" is the new "Grande." No, that can't be right.

Is it the prices? Perhaps there is some correlation between the biggest drink and the most expensive menu item? But there's no mention of "buy this food item, get this drink."

Now I'm pondering who would pay $1 for a small (or "partfait-sized") drink when, for the same price, you could get a large (or "salad-sized.")

It's also weird that there isn't additional copy in the ad to reference the food, so is it possible it's just a huge mistake? That can't be. Or can it? Somebody help me!

ADDITIONAL THEORIES:

From Lee, at 9:21 AM:

Well, since everybody knows that eating a McDonald's salad is a horrible ordeal, maybe the ad is suggesting that you need a really big jolt of Coke to compensate for it.

From my friend Erica, at 9:23 AM:

It might be that the calorie content of the drinks is directly adverse to the calorie content in the food.
So if you are having a parfait, there are lots of calories, so you need a smaller drink to offset the calories in the drink.

Whereas, in theory, the salad has the least amount of calories (though it really doesn' [Ed: note: not necessarily, though we don't know which salad is being mentioned!) and you can "get away with" drinking the calories in a larger soda.

Not a good idea for an ad campaign though.

Hmm. Weird.

From Bryan, at 12:03 PM:

Erica might be right, if so it's just a really bad ad that emphasizes the ludicrousness of trying to consider McDonalds to be somehow "healthful." If that is the case, you can bet when the agency presented it it made more sense, but the client ruined it with "we need to leverage the parfait more" and such.

But I'm betting on "accident." McDonalds seems to target every ad at every single breathing human being on the planet earth, at the cost of any sort of subtlety or creativity. They're the Wayne Brady of advertising, only not as intellectual. So there's no way they'd expect their customers to make sense of that.

Mistakes like that happen all the time, though I can't imagine McDonalds knowingly letting it go, considering how much a bus tail costs (both production and placement). So I'd bet they're being replaced as buses come in for maintenance.

From K at 12:15 PM:

Pretty sure the size of the drink relates to the size of the food. Parfait is smaller than the sandwich, etc.

And the drinks aren't even different sizes, just different depths of field. Weird, weird ad.

Yeah, they screwed up.

From Dawson at 3:45 PM:

They're all a dollar, although photos of everything would've made more sense...

From Jeff at 3:50 PM:

I believe they are breakfast $1, lunch $1 and dinner $1 beverage. It is suppose to be depth of field. It is the same cup in each example just further away

Not a good ad

From Maureen at 4:20 PM:

I assumed those were the foods being soaked in coke. Chicken sandwich coke float. Salad coke float. Is that not what that means?