Clever Marketing Campaign Makes Fun of Frivolous Lawsuits, Fast Food, and Meat Eaters

This post is a bit different from many of the others you’ll find here. Rather than looking into actual strange legal cases, we’ll be looking at a clever bit of marketing that parodies frivolous lawsuits and some of the best-known fast food mascots in the world.

A Fun and Funny Commercial

Recently, a company based out of California started to run some rather funny commercials as part of their vegan meat campaign. The company, Alpha Foods, has created advertising that mimics those old commercials with an attorney standing in front of a shelf of books and talking to the camera. We’ve all seen this type of advertising in the past for actual class-action lawsuits, and for the first couple of seconds, you might think it’s real. But only the first couple of seconds.

The beginning of the commercial starts with the fake attorney asking, “Did you unknowingly become vegan because of Alpha Foods’ plant-based products that taste too good to be true?”

The video then goes on to discuss a fictional class-action suit against Alpha Foods for people who have been fooled by plant-based food. The fun doesn’t stop there, though. They have “interviews” with blurred-out versions of Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders, and Wendy and how much trouble Alpha Foods has brought into their life.

The Colonel Sanders character, for example, says that he got hooked on the plant-based products Alpha Foods sells. He laments that they turned him into a hippie vegan. Ronald says he isn’t happy about being duped into becoming a vegan. It’s his job to be happy, so he’s suing for lost wages. Wendy says her family will disown her when they find out.

The lawyer says that he wants you to help him “hammer Alpha Foods so bad that no one will ever again be victimized by a plant or any number of plants.”

The commercial is clever and funny from beginning to end. They have even set up a website, AlphaFoodsClassAction.com that is just as funny as the commercial. They have an FAQ, which is similar to what you might find on any actual class-action lawsuit site, for example.

The first question on their FAQ is “Is this a real class action lawsuit?” Their answer is as cheeky as you would expect—“It’s as real as Alpha Foods plant-based hamburgers are meat.”

How Can They Use Mascots from Fast Food Places?

While they couldn’t actually use the real mascots and call them by their names, the campaign has a clever way of getting around this. First, they never use the names of the mascots or the restaurants. Instead, there are keywords in the things they say that make viewers instantly understand who they are parodying—chicken, family, happy.

Also, the testimonials featuring the characters are all blurred out. Sure, it looks like Wendy, Ronald, and the Colonel… but their faces aren’t clear enough to identify, according to the information on their FAQ.

Alpha Foods is becoming well-known for its campaigns, although this one has certainly taken things up a notch. Previously, they dropped the price of vegan chicken nuggets when there was a chicken shortage in the United States. They dropped it by the same amount that actual chicken nuggets went up in price, as a way to get people to try their products. During that campaign, they also had people outside of Popeye’s and similar fast food places handing out coupons for Alpha Foods products.

Overall, they have a fun and smart way to reach new potential customers with this latest ad campaign. Some people might try plant-based food just to see how it compares to meat because they saw the commercial or website.