McDonald's Puts the Accent on Advertising

McDonald's has launched an ambitious marketing campaign for its new coffee line, McCafé. In one commercial currently saturating American airwaves, viewers are advised that you can "McCafé your day" by enlivening your daily grind. The ad extends the acute accent mark at the end of "McCafé" to various other words: a "commute" becomes a "commuté," a "cubicle" becomes a "cubiclé," and so forth. Will this wordplay work with American consumers, or will the exotic diacritics fall on deaf ears?

Here is the commercial in question:

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Dan Neil thinks the McCafé campaign "has a bit of a language problem":

"McCafé" is hard to say — having three stressed syllables — and American audiences have almost no experience with diacritical marks, so the acute accent mark on the final é is going to leave some fast-fooders bewildered.

I wonder how many Americans would really be "bewildered" by an acute accent mark. In any case, the "commuté" commercial takes on any diacritical confusion head-on, by grafting the accent onto everyday English words. The suggestion seems to be that your prosaic life can be improved by the simple addition of an iced mocha coffee, just as a jaunty little line over a mild-mannered "e" can add a dash of linguistic élan.

Some viewers may be reminded of other pseudo-foreignized words in American parlance. In particular, it brings to mind the jokey pronunciation of Target, the chain of retail stores, as "Tar-ZHAY." According to Laura Rowley's 2003 history of the company, On Target, this faux French rendering of "Target" actually dates all the way back to 1962, the year that the first Target store opened. Despite the irony of pronouncing the name of a discount retailer as if it were an upscale boutique, the company has in fact embraced "Tar-ZHAY," working the Frenchified word into its own ad campaigns.

Going back even further, in 1940 W.C. Fields played a character named Egbert Souse in the movie The Bank Dick. Souse, of course, is a synonym for drunkard, but the Fields character insists there is an accent over the "e." "It's pronounced Sous-AY!" he would say. "Accent grave over the e!" (Actually, it's not an accent grave but an accent aigu, an error that further underscores the character's buffoonish airs.) And fans of the 1984 cult classic film Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai may recall the character John Bigboote, who similarly insisted, "It's 'Big-boo-TAY!' Tay! Tay! Tay!" (For more pop-cultural examples, see "It Is Pronounced Tro-PAY" on the Television Tropes & Idioms website.)

McDonald's may actually be using tongue-in-cheek pseudo-French pronunciations like "commuté" and "cubiclé" as a way of poking fun at the whole idea of dressing up coffee in the froufrou Starbucks style. (Compare the Dunkin' Donuts "Fritalian" commercial.) In this way the commercials are signaling that McDonald's doesn't take this whole coffee thing too seriously. The trick is to do this without poking fun at McCafé drinkers themselves. No one wants to be treated as a self-important heir to Egbert Sousé — or the garbageman once played by Jonathan Winters in Hefty trash bag commercials who pompously pronounced garbage as "gar-BAZH." But if Target found hidden cachet as "Tar-ZHAY," who's to say McCafé can't make a similar play? Anything is possiblé.