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.
