Taco Bell compares McDonald's to a communist dictatorship

Taco Bell

The ad depicts a dystopian society where everyone is forced to eat McDonald's for breakfast.

Defectors dream of eating breakfast sandwiches in the shape of a hexagon, and in the end, two of them achieve their goal by escaping the dictatorship and eating Taco Bell's A.M. Crunchwrap.

The ad is Taco Bell's latest effort to chip away at McDonald's dominance in the fast food breakfast market.

It never explicitly uses the McDonald's name, but the mock society's authority figures, like the one pictured below, resemble Ronald McDonald.

Taco Bell

The ad's visuals "nicely mimic the state-sanctioned artwork of the communist era-e.g., majestic sunburst portraits, imposing statues-and morph it into a series of creative, dog-whistle attacks," writes Ad Age. But "the frivolous McDespot comparison is also perhaps a touch insensitive, given, you know, the mass killings and other atrocities that marked the Stalinist and Maoist regimes."

Here's one of the propoganda posters:

Taco Bell

Watch the ad.