I don't really have a strong set of arguments and counter-arguments to the whole thing, but basically, here's my two cents:
Whenever I see an Ad that tries to demonstrate the horrors or evils of a certain company or product, I have come to imagine the type of people I have known who would openly try to push said ads... The pompous, overbearing, pseudo-intellectualist pricks who think a witty quote that compares Sam Walton to the Totalitarianistic Dictator 'Big Brother' will actually change the world as they talk about the 'didactic' and 'important' book or comic they read or saw the other day, never doing anything but pushing self-righteous propaganda in other peoples' faces and thinking they are better than you for it... It may just be me, but I wouldn't be surprised if most other people don't have a certain similar image in their mind when something like that shows up. I'm not entirely unappreciative of the message, of course, but the stigma does burn brightly in my mind.
I think a main problem is that people have grown numb to satire and anti-business humor... They've seen enough.
I've had the displeasure of working at Walmart before, and from that experience, I can show a perfect example of just what I mean by 'numb': Employees, most if not all, hated their jobs, some even their own lives as they were pushed and pulled emotionally and physically each and every day... To keep from going insane from the pressure, most would turn to jokes to make it bearable. The ones of lesser intellect (which was most), would simply use blatant sarcasm and snicker a bit... The moderately intelligent might ask when they'll be sent to the glue factory... Whatever the mindframe or intellect they used, however, it was all the same: they would joke, they would laugh back the tears, and they would go back to work. They never left, since rarely was there another option, they never stood up for themselves, and they never did anything... Nobody could blame them for this, but that is how it was - they made a witty little statement, but it never changed anything.
Much like the satire I see, people see a witty little comment and they might laugh, they hear Colbert wittily remark about how injustice is all right because the burgers are just so delicious, they hear the activists holding a one-sentence picket sign and shouting what has by then become a mindlessly repeated mantra... They hear so many of these cute sayings and see so much of the horror that they are numb to the whole mess. They will continue buying the cardboard patties from McDonalds with sweatshops and clearcutting in the back of their minds, continue to shop at Wal-mart despite the drained look on every employees' face, and will continue to slip Nike shoes over their feet knowing that the children who made them had none of their own.
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Added the next day...
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Also, I think the simple fact that when people see slaughtering and injustice caused by McDonalds, then walk into the inside of a McDonalds restaurant, there's probably going to be a certain jarring contrast between them that makes the slaughter seem unreal when you go into the clean stores and see 'Happy Meals'. Kind of like if your friendly elderly neighbor, who you've grown so friendly with that you'd been calling her grandma, is arrested for operating a rather large-scale basement meth lab... You've seen only the friendly grandma, and no matter how many videos and photos of the lab you saw and newspaper columns you'd read, you would probably always have a hard time believing she was a criminal. We've grown to see the clean McDonalds with their cheap yet tasty burgers, Wal-Mart with their smiley-face mascot and always low prices, and the comfort and high quality of the Nike shoes... When faced with conflicting information, no matter how real you KNOW it is, doesn't hit so hard when you have seen only the greener side of the fence.
(Sorry for the rather lengthy comment, but talking out of my ass seems all the funner when it seems that I'm actually making decent remarks.)
