Hacker News Reader

Comment by lessnonymous | Hacker News Reader

Adult sees an advertisement for McDonald's Healthy Salad. Kid points to it and wants to go to McDonalds. Parent likes that kid responded to ad for salad.

But the kid was really responding to an ad for deep fried processed chicken and potato.

View on HN

Never going to happen, because the PR fallout would be terrible. Lenticular presentation doesn't make you immune from seeing the image if you're above a certain age. Adults will still see it if they're short, if they're sitting down, if the billboard company put it a bit too high or in a bad place, if you're crouching down to tie your kid's shoe, because you've been told it's there by an article or someone involved in installing it... the list goes on. This is the kind of thing people will overlook for a noble cause, but would have bad fallout for commercial gain.

> Never going to happen,

I wouldn't be so sure. Advertisement industry uses a lot of tricks that are not really different from this one. Some people don't like them but most people don't notice or don't care.

Another example is Facebook that keeps adding features that reduce people's privacy, you see a lot of complains on the web, yet they don't change anything because 99% are fine with it.

So it's definitely not because a trick can be detected, that it isn't worth using it.

But in Facebook's example, the 1% who were not fine with it made enough noise to have Facebook regulated by the federal government. They are now mandated to honor your privacy settings, no matter what.

So that example falls a bit short in that if it's egregious enough of a trick, regulators will take notice.

Yeah, think of the PR fallout of using cartoonish characters, toys and fucking playgrounds to advertise directly to kids. McDonald's would never do that.

That's really not the same as going out of their way to hide the advertising from parents.

Nice fantasy, but not practical. You'll notice that the two images shown in the sign are nearly identical. You don't want a shadow of the one image to be seen in the other or it gives the entire illusion away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com