With rising levels of obesity at the top of the news agenda, the last thing McDonald's needs at the moment is the arrival of Morgan Spurlock.
As the star of anti-fast food film Super Size Me - which documents the weight gain and liver problems he develops from living on nothing but McDonald's food for a month - Spurlock could prove to be a one-man publicity disaster for the restaurant chain.
In the past, low-budget polemical films such as Super Size Me would have bounced off thick-skinned corporations. But the rise in popularity of Michael Moore - who criticised General Motors in the film Roger & Me and Wal-Mart in Bowling for Columbine - has helped promote this type of film to a much wider audience, which only adds to the difficulties companies such as McDonald's face in fighting back.
When Super Size Me was released in Australia in June, McDonald's decided that attack was the best form of defence and ran a blanket television and cinema advertising campaign. Guy Russo, chief executive of McDonald's Australia, appeared in the ads, describing the documentary as 'about a person that decides to overeat', adding: 'Surprise, surprise - he finds out it was an error. I could have told him that.'
The film went on to enjoy the highest-ever opening for a documentary in Australia. Danny Perkins, head of distribution at Optimum Releasing, the company behind the UK launch of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, says that all the ads achieved was to promote the movie. 'The Australian distributors could never have afforded to run television ads promoting the release of a documentary,' he says. 'McDonald's gave them better publicity than they could have dreamed of.'
Cautious fightback
The UK arm of the fast-food giant is taking a much subtler approach.
'The right response depends on the target audience and their level of awareness of the issues,' says a spokeswoman for the chain. 'It is important that the response is targeted and well thought through, or it will just publicise the film.'
The first stage of the company's UK counter-offensive shows just how concerned it is about the film. McDonald's has taken out full-page ads in the T2 section of The Times and the film review sections of The Guardian and The Independent. The ads, which carry the headline 'If you haven't seen Super Size Me, here's what you're missing', aim to dilute the film's impact by agreeing that overeating McDonald's and underexercising is unhealthy. They point out that Spurlock's consumption levels over one month equate to the amount of fast food an average McDonald's customer in the UK eats over six to seven years, and promote the chain's salad and healthy-eating ranges.
Ads have also been taken out in the Scottish press to coincide with Spurlock's appearance at the Edinburgh Film Festival to promote the movie.
A similar approach was used by Royal Mail to counter a damaging investigative documentary broadcast on television earlier this year. The programme, featured on Channel 4's Dispatches series, claimed to reveal instances of theft by postal workers.
First, to show the public that it was taking positive action, the company launched a public relations offensive, announcing that it would tighten the vetting of potential employees. Then Adam Crozier, Royal Mail's chief executive, took legal action, challenging allegations made in the programme. The action is ongoing.
McDonald's is likely to require more defensive PR in the weeks ahead.
From September, the politically-oriented, US-based Jim Rose Circus is embarking on a nationwide tour of the UK.
It bills itself as a collection of 'freaks of nurture', among whom is Big Mak, a 450-pound contortionist who gives particular credit to McDonald's for his obesity, and eats Big Macs throughout the performance.
Growing danger
Films with a message are undoubtedly becoming more mass-market. The Day After Tomorrow mixed blockbuster budgets and Hollywood glamour with a storyline about the dangers of climate change. In the UK, it was seized upon by the Stop Esso lobby group, whose campaigners erected a mock newspaper sales desk at the film's pre-launch screening and gave away copies of a paper that highlighted the business practices of the oil giant.
So what is the best way for brands to combat the rise of polemical films?
PR guru Mark Borkowski warns that any overt actions to counter one-man documentary films - which he calls a form of 'corporate terrorism' - could result in a groundswell of support for the perceived underdog.
Instead, brands are harnessing 'underground' tactics. 'A lot of the discrediting of films such as Bowling for Columbine is done on the web by well-targeted pressure groups backed by the companies under attack,' he says. 'You can't go into battle with a Michael Moore - it is difficult to tackle heroes - so brands are being more subtle.'
According to Borkowski, in the US in particular a lot of money is being spent on specialist public relations to create crack teams able to tackle this sort of brand attack.
The ultimate answer, however, is for companies to clean up their acts.
'The likes of Nestle and McDonald's have to take this extremely seriously,' he concludes. 'People want to see social responsibility. There have to be brand truths; companies can no longer just buy their way into a marketplace.'
DATA FILE - BRAND ATTACKS
- Naomi Klein's landmark book No Logo is credited with kick-starting the anti-corporate debate by focusing on the global strategies of major brands such as Coca-Cola, Shell and Nike.
- Michael Moore's film Bowling For Columbine looked at gun culture in the US and pressured Wal-Mart, the biggest retailer in the US, over its sale of ammunition.
- Roger & Me, another Michael Moore film, targeted General Motors by looking at the impact of the closure of its manufacturing plants on towns dependent on the car company as the major employer.
- Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, a Robert Greenwald film, looked at how media empires, and in particular Fox News, control what the public sees.
- Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation put the practices of fast-food companies under the microscope.