Day 024 - 15 Sep 94 - Page 58


     
     1        I do know that we at some point along the chain of events
     2        obtained sufficient assurances from McDonald's that the
     3        ads were not going to run again, and the ads were stopped
     4        for the time being, that we did not feel the need to
     5        proceed further.  As far as I am aware, the ads as they
     6        were constituted in this campaign did not run again.
     7        I believe that some portions of some of the ads, not
     8        including any of the ads we had specifically objected to,
     9        did run later, but that is not the same advertising
    10        campaign as the campaign to which we objected.  In the
    11        same sense that you can change one or two words in an
    12        advertisement and change it from truthful to deceptive or
    13        back again, you can change one or two ads in an
    14        advertising campaign and change it from being deceptive to
    15        being perfectly acceptable.  Not every word in every
    16        paragraph or even every page of these advertisements at
    17        issue was deceptive.  Some of them were innocuous enough
    18        that they could well have been re-run or re-run with very
    19        slight changes and  ---
    20
    21   Q.   But as a whole?
    22        A.  -- not raise any questions under Texas law.  Our
    23        organisation was to the campaign as it had appeared.  We
    24        did receive assurances that that would not occur again.
    25        That was all we could solve.
    26
    27   Q.   Was there any admission of liability on McDonald's part?
    28        A.  No, and I would have been both shocked and very proud
    29        of myself if there had been.  Our practice was never, and
    30        I can recall of no case in which we ever required a
    31        company to engage public or privately in any mea culpa
    32        when we settled a matter.  If a court adjudged a company
    33        to have acted deceptively, that was another matter, but we
    34        to foster resolution never and, to my knowledge, it was
    35        rarely if ever done in any other State Attorneys General's
    36        office in consumer matters, required a company to
    37        acknowledge that the conduct in which it had clearly
    38        engaged -- there is rarely a dispute, especially in
    39        advertising, that the advertisements had appeared; the
    40        dispute was whether or not they were deceptive.  So, we
    41        never, to my memory, asked a company to admit that what it
    42        had done was illegal.  What we saw was a commitment that
    43        the wrong not recur in the future.  In the same vein as
    44        I have previously testified, if a company wants to put in
    45        language wherein it denies everything, not unlike the
    46        letter from Mr. Califano, that would have been perfectly
    47        acceptable as well.
    48
    49        We did not care what the company's position was on the
    50        merits, as long as the company's actions were to stop the 
    51        illegalities.  That was the prime enforcement purpose that 
    52        we had; we acted to stop and to stop it preferably while 
    53        it was still going on and to prevent it happening again.
    54
    55        These were placements for the first two quarters of 1987.
    56        We were wanting to make sure there was not another
    57        placement for the third or fourth quarter of 1987; that
    58        what had been a several months campaign did not become a
    59        year-long campaign.  I believe we were successful in that
    60        effort.

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