Rachel Bowlby: The new frontier in advertising is unhappy families

A television ad for McDonald's running now may be an historical first: it's about divorced parents. It's also an unnervingly witty psychological drama. A small boy is about to go out with his father for the morning. He negotiates separately with each parent about how the day will be spent – first with his mother, as she gets him ready, and then, in the car, with his father. Each parent is told by the child that the the other is taking him to the zoo and, on this basis, each trying to outdo that treat, they both end up agreeing to take him to McDonald's.

This is new social and psychological territory for advertising. First, featuring divorce and children departs from the long-standing expectation that ads shall show only a conventional model of the happy family, with loving parental couple as standard. Whatever the reality of the lives outside the box – happy or not so happy, nuclear or not so nuclear – the suggestion has been that ideally "the family" is this; and that all parents and children would like to enjoy the happiness of this kind of family, with its comforting and desirable blending of security and fun.

Momentary indications of discord are permitted, usually with a comic spin and generally mocking some foolish new man who, though willing, can't really handle the simplest domestic tasks. But tensions are always humorous, and always released in the end. Ads are not the place for hinting at family trouble that might be more than a little diversion from the satisfying norm.

So the McDonald's story does away with a fundamental convention about the representation of social reality. Here is the classic nuclear trio of mother, father and child, but it is not a unit and there is no performance of private happiness. And that is not all that is new. The commercial also modifies the basic psychology of adland, in which close relationships for the most part are open, communicative and benign.

The basic terms of this homely fantasy have not altered even with hypermodern ads for such products as mobile phones and the internet. These present us with a global village version of family and community: out there are lots of like-minded people just waiting to greet you as if they know you already. The connections of hi-tech communication are never shown as a solution to loneliness, or as links that might be made secretly or in some way at odds with the rest of life. They are not the substitute for an inadequate reality, but the expansion of an already happy one. The message is that technology doesn't depersonalise; the real world is friendly, and the new hi-tech world is simply a happy extension of that.

Against this background it's clear that the McDonald's ad marks another kind of change. It does not show open communication – not one-to-one between parent and child or parent and parent, and definitely not between all three. Each character operates independently and tactically; the child is manipulative and the parents are competitive, both wanting to be the one to give the child a special time (and both also acting as "sensible parents", seeing a need to balance zoos with fast food or vice versa). The child is the one in control, and the one who gets what he wants; the adults are in the same position as each other, both of them equally in the dark about the day's full agenda as it finally appears.

McDonald's has a long history of targeting children in its advertising and promotions; this latest example only adds to that dishonourable record. It targets them not just by suggesting McDonald's as the destination of choice, but also by showing children as successful strategists. What we see is not grown-ups, whether advertisers or parents, imposing things on children, but children getting round grown-ups.

Far from being a disadvantage for the child, parental separation is shown as a means of surreptitiously doubling your ration of Happy Meals. Divide and drool: split the parental unit in half, and you can have two where you would only have had one. The success of the boy's strategy depends on the non-conferring of these particular parents, but though the ad might be taken, for better or worse, as promoting the benefits of parental separation (at least from the child's point of view), what it shows is merely an extreme version of all the situations in which children play-off adults, parents especially, against each another.

On the face of it, this is an ad about greed. The child gets to eat at McDonald's not just once, but twice in one day. And it seems that he really does want the second trip, because he is prepared to give up something else: he goes for two McDonald's burgers over the more varied (and parentally favoured) menu of one McDonald's plus the zoo. But that McDonald's fulfilment is not what appears: nothing so loudly colourful as a hamburger or fast food outlet mars the muted sophistication of this ad. The satisfaction we see is not the bite into the burger, but the triumph of a devious strategy – of a brilliant and appalling piece of manipulation.

Devious strategy, did I say? Appalling manipulation? Funny coincidence, that's just the sort of thing they used to say about advertising. In the boring old days, when the only place you could take the kids was the zoo.

rachelbowlby@aol.com

The writer is the author of 'Carried Away' (Faber & Faber)