This Should Work

In the movie Dogma Cardinal Glick (played by George Carlin) says one of the keys to raising the attendance numbers in the Catholic Church is to “Hook’em while they’re young!” To which Rufus (played by Chris Rock) replies “Kinda like the tobacco industry.”

Well now McDonalds is taking the “Hook’em while they’re young!” into the high tech world. Many McDonalds recently installed WiFi hotspots in their restaurants where you can play with your Nintendo DS for free (laptop users pay a small fee). And now it looks they’ve got a new patent (with Disney) to keep the little ones coming back for more according to arstechnica.com.

The patent, which names McDonald’s as a potential customer, describes a portable media player that would be bundled with kids’ meals and would offer incremental downloads of movies, music, and games (Oh, and ads, of course. You do like ads, don’t you?). The “incremental” bit is key to the system, because it means that you have to go back again… and again… and quite possibly again to gain access to the complete content. The idea is that each Happy Meal purchased would provide more credit that could be used for downloading the latest Disney tie-in.

The scary thing is I could see this thing branching out from Happy meals to “adult” Value meals. Just think, it’s the end of your favorite show, let’s say Lost, and after you’re left hanging with a great “sneak peek at next week’s episode” they say “Want to see more? Watch the first fifteen minutes of next week’s episode for free with the purchase of any McDonalds Extra Value Meal.” It could happen.

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