Dimbulb's take is this: "the franchisee is trying to tell the local base of customer [sic] something that matters to them, albeit unrelated to the business or experience of retailing fast food...Buy BK if you're a stalwart for burning oil and coal; hell, let's split some atoms while we're at it!"

That might be a good analysis (of a seriously whackadoo franchise owner, among other things) if the author hadn't failed to connect the two bits of text on the sign. As it stands, in other words, I think he just missed the joke. For those who also missed it, here it is:

1. Global warming is baloney;
2. therefore, we can conscionably and will facilitate your ability to drive your wasteful, fossil-fuel-powered cars through our wasteful, fossil-fuel-powered restaurant. 24 hours a day. 365 days a year.

Ha ha, right?

Now, the fact that this message is less likely a contentious non sequitur political statement than a one-liner, less neo-conservative psychosis than tastelessness, doesn't make it any less an advertising misstep. But it does disabuse us of the seemingly inexplicable belief that the franchise seriously asserted a value proposition like this ("rather a Whopper at 2AM tonight than a planet in 10,000 years") in such a bald-faced way.

A friend of ours recently sent us an email noting that of all the posts we've written about design and advertising ethics, we haven't ever touched on an important and prevalent unethical advertising phenomenon -- the degrading use of women in advertising.

A cursory glance at the landscape revealed everything from campaigns that feature women who appear to be dead to those that use gross sexual imagery to sell totally non-sexy products.

Duncan Quinn advertises suits with an image of a man who appears to have strangled an underwear-clad woman on the hood of a car.

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