The Commercial that Killed a Fast Food Chain

good morning john you and i grew up going to racks it was for the days when we'd been good when wendy's wasn't good enough when it was time to split a cookie so soft and gooey that you could push it back together and it would stay that way rax was a roast beef place like arby's except that it was constantly undergoing identity crises and it had no idea what it wanted to be mostly in their advertising they just wanted to make the case that they somehow weren't like the other major fast food chain here's one of the most successful attempts to do that implying people are oppressed because they can only get one kind of chicken sandwich at racks you can get an eenie meenie and a mini minnie and miney where's moe no more oh they tried so hard to make that work many of their ads tried excluding demographics to make it more appealing to their core audience except that they always then like pushed back against it here's a good example rax it's good for adults and also kids but only kids who act like they're adults there are lots of bad racks ads there's one where a phone eats a sandwich which features yoga jones from orange is the new black this one with the giant chicken foot and then there's one where a woman wants a pita pocket with a meatball in it and she explodes ads were bad in the 80s and 90s and these are all your normal bad ad fair but as racks continued to lose focus and market share with an all-you-can-eat pasta bar upgraded interiors getting into pizza for some reason they went all in on the worst idea ever mr delicious hello i'm mr delicious the new spokesman for racks restaurants my job to encourage you to enjoy tasty affordable meals in a more mature dining environment he's like a low energy rodney dangerfield he is a sad man and that vacation he took to bora bora with those two young friends well that left mr delicious feeling empty and unfulfilled now you need to explain mr delicious just had some rather delicate surgery if there's no change he doesn't have to squirm so much to put it back in his pocket did we just hear about mr delicious's vasectomy because his analyst charges a lot to keep mr d's hostility all locked up wait what mr delicious always carries this briefcase mr d what's in the briefcase and all of this is paired with the worst or possibly best tagline in all of fast food history cracks you can eat here i think there's an element of parody here like you can eat here is definitely a parody of a tagline mr delicious is a parody of what a spokesperson is he's not fun he's not happy he's not engaging but they're also trying to do a thing they're trying to identify with a core audience but who is that audience it's fast food for grown-ups misogynist unfunny alcoholic sad grown-ups who gamble too much and go to psychotherapy now the wonderful thing here is we have a lot of insight into mr delicious because the ad agency and the management of racks worked together to create a mini documentary about how successful mr delicious was mr delicious speaks honestly to the kinds of problems and issues that we all face i mean does he i don't feel like he does who is the target market for this 15 minute mini duck one assumes it was the rax franchisees who were i'm sure livid that the company was being mismanaged so dramatically yeah i go to the can during the commercials but now that mr d is on i'll just hold it mr delicious reminds me of my dad it's somewhat telling that the 15-minute long pro mr delicious propaganda documentary they put together included this line mr delicious is obnoxious oh my god racks filed for bankruptcy less than a year after the launch of mr delicious making the confidence of this statement absolutely going to go down as one of the classic characters in advertising history seem just a little off the mark now rax had a ton of problems and mr delicious didn't cause all of them it was a cutthroat time in the fast food industry but whatever gamble these people decided they had to make it went even worse than mr d's trip to reno john i'll see you tomorrow

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 7,887,919

Keywords: commercials, advertising, fast food, hank green, vlogbrothers, rax, humor, nerdfighteria, education

Id: uEcz8I64Mz0

Length: 3min 57sec (237 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020