Recently, Chris Kempczinski ate a burger. It didn’t go well.Kempczinski is the CEO of McDonald’s. The burger was the Big Arch, the company’s newest offering. And the problem was a video. In it, Kempczinski—looking trim and clean in a beige sweater, oxford collar peeping out—picks up the burger and politely appraises it. He calls it a “product.” He describes the bun as “unique.” He takes a dainty bite, declares it “so good,” and then moves on with his life. There’s nothing to suggest that he is lying, but he’s not exactly selling it, either.People online found this quite troubling. “This man does not eat McDonald’s,” one post on X said. Burger King weighed in with its own response, as did Wendy’s, and Jack in the Box, and A&W. Soon enough, according to the news, Kempczinski was “under fire.” If you logged on between Tuesday morning and yesterday afternoon, you’d have been forgiven for thinking Kempczinski did something much, much worse than bite into a hamburger wrong.Maybe he did. The Big Arch video was discomfiting because it broke the rules of the internet-based marketing economy that Kempczinski belongs to (whether he wants to or not). The incident is an object lesson in what happens when the logic of food influencerdom collides with the reality of running a giant business.[Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich]Kempczinski is, by all accounts, an old-school guy: Harvard M.B.A., corporate pedigree, dorky affect, immaculate email hygiene, respectable marathon times, seriousness and diligence emanating from him like cartoon stink lines. He became CEO of McDonald’s in 2019, after a career spent in leadership at PepsiCo and Kraft Foods. His aura, as one commenter put it, “screams kale salad,” not sloppy, thousand-calorie burger. His most recent Instagram post before the disastrous Big Arch reel featured him in a long-sleeve polo shirt sharing tips for traveling internationally. They included exercise and avoiding alcohol.But Kempczinski exists in a decidedly new-school marketing environment, one where CEOs are celebrities and celebrities are CEOs. John Legere posts gym selfies, Kevin O’Leary stars in movies, Elon Musk shares his every passing thought to all who will listen, Donald Trump is the most famous person in the world. Meanwhile, Rihanna, Jessica Alba, Selena Gomez, Ryan Reynolds, and others have turned artistic success into huge consumer-goods businesses, hawking stuff they claim to use themselves. In all of these cases, the line between selling products and selling oneself is more blurred than ever before. Paid media (advertising) and earned media (influencing) are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.Today’s internet values relatability more than authority. It loves to confuse informality for authenticity. This is why the social-media accounts of multinational corporations all speak like sleepy teenagers (“my crush just dropped 1500 reward points on me what does that make us,” reads a February 13 post from McDonald’s), and why the “get ready with me” video format—in which lifestyle influencers apply moisturizer for an audience of millions—is so enduring. It’s also why, presumably, Kempczinski filmed the Big Arch video in the first place. Every person is a brand, and every brand has a personality.[Read: The brands are very sorry about your trauma]In Kempczinski’s business, the most effective form of marketing is the rapturous taste test, ideally delivered by someone who seems genuinely enthusiastic, and who can convey that enthusiasm in a way that’s memorable enough to stand out from all the other people online doing taste tests. The ones who have mastered the form—the food world’s most successful salespeople and biggest celebrities—are influencers, such as the women behind the VIP List, who have nearly half a million followers on TikTok and review food in the chatty, hyperbolic way a friend might. On their feed, a good hamburger is “crack,” a bad one is “traumatizing,” and just about the highest praise a dish can receive is that it “fucks.” The reactions are physical, almost carnal—all the more legible on a small screen. The analysis is unsubtle and straightforward. It’s a performance, to be sure, but no one would ever accuse these people of not meaning what they say.Kempczinski’s sin was this: He tried to act like an influencer, but he isn’t very good at it. He projects the wrong kind of authenticity. He doesn’t look like a man who eats McDonald’s, and he speaks in notably more grammatical sentences than the person running his company’s X account. He doesn’t talk about food in the colloquial, exaggerated way we’ve come to expect from people eating before a front-facing camera. In short, he’s a LinkedIn guy in a TikTok world—a traditional CEO, not a professional charisma machine ostentatiously having his life changed by a beef patty between buns. If you saw him eat a burger this way in a restaurant, you wouldn’t bat an eye, because he ate it like a normal person. Of course it made for bad content.