McCafe Campaign: Rich, with a Heavy Accent

Is it possible that McDonald's (MCD) fears that its customers might pronounce McCafe as "mick-caff?"

I'm not sure. It could be that the chain simply wants to put across the idea that its new coffee drinks are high-end, so that's why it's basing much of its new ad blitz, with a reported pan-media spend of $100 million, on the accent mark at the end of McCafé.

In the TV part of the campaign, says Advertising Age: "When you 'McCafé your day,' a commute becomes a commuté. When a pal drops by your cubicle with an iced mocha, it's a cubiclé."

Sounds a bit lamé to me, and "McCafé Your Day" does not fall trippingly from the tongue. It's clumsy. But Marlena Peleo-Lazar, McDonald's chief creative officer, told Ad Age that the accent shows that there is "a wit and charm to the brand, and to the products and to McDonald's."

The Los Angeles Times' Dan Neil wondered the same thing I did. "American audiences have almost no experience with diacritical marks," he wrote, "so the acute accent mark on the final é is going to leave some fast-fooders bewildered." The accent-mark campaign, therefore, comes "[i]n spite of, or perhaps because of, the diacritical issue."

Neil described the overall campaign as "an everywhere-you-look, invade-your-dreams" effort "that will be not so much viral as bubonic."

It seems to me that McDonald's is lurching here. It doesn't quite seem to know how it should market McCafé. Should it appeal to its core—casting itself, opposite the upscale Starbucks (SBUX), as a place for regular folks? (It has already tried this tack.) Or should it just admit that froufrou coffee drinks probably need froufrou (at least, for McDonald's) marketing?