Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#41

Post by deno » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:11 PM UTC

ryanwhitney wrote: post #26

eykanal wrote: post #21

I'll disagree slightly with tptacek... this is a genius piece of marketing by McDonalds. It does everything that we routinely see listed on this very site as Best Practices™: - Respond to customer feedback in a friendly and highly transparent manner. - Don't sugarcoat things that "everyone knows but no one admits"; they could have avoided showing the graphic artist photoshopping the burger, but everyone knows that th…

You claim they responded transparently and without sugar coating anything. So what was the answer to the original question? Why does the ad burger patty appear thicker and larger? Edit: So many answers talking about how they might make a quarter pound patty look larger. Anyone can do that. I was addressing the fact that the video in no way covers why they look larger in advertisements. Sidestepping the important ques…

“Here you can definitely see there’s a size difference. The boxes that our sandwiches come in keep the sandwiches warm, which creates a bit of a steam effect, and it does make the bun contract a little bit.”

3:05 – 3:12

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#42

Post by jpxxx » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:13 PM UTC

ryanwhitney wrote: post #33

evan_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They addressed it directly. When it sits in the box, the steam makes the bun wilt.

Referring to the meat, not the bun.

McDonald's grills press the meat patties in real-world production. It drives out fluids and the finished product appears smaller than one cooked by different methods.

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#43

Post by wildmXranat » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:13 PM UTC

Extremely demanding schedule of lately has forced me to sacrifice on the quality of my daily food intake, where I snack occasionally on fast food items so here are my thoughts:

Biggest issue with fast food is sort of linked to the "uglification for the sake of taste", but let's get one thing straight: fast food quality and taste is damn bad. So that excuse is out the window. I've tried everything on McD's menu including their newer 'bistro' or whatever sandwiches and all of them left me wondering WTF is wrong with this food.

The biggest offender of this is, and I truly mean it - Tim Hortons. Ever since about two years ago or so, their food became garbage. They too have the pretty moving adverts in-store on their LCDs, but I'll be damned if I buy another item from that chain.

Lesson learned: make and pack my own food as much as possible.

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#44

Post by lmkg » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:14 PM UTC

chadrs wrote: post #7

tptacek wrote: post #4

This is clever (if cynical) marketing from McDonalds Canada: take one of the oldest knocks against large-scale fast food (that's it's marketed dishonestly) and turn it into a product benefit: "it's ugly because we took the original product, which is beautiful, and then uglified it to make it taste better". One thing that makes this piece cynical is that the integrity of fast food promo graphics is not a new or pressi…

I was always under the impression that most food photography was not just using different ingredients, but that they were actually using inedible materials (paint, glue, clay, etc.) on/for the food in the pictures.

I'm trying to reconcile this (which I've heard before) with what other people are saying about advertising laws, and I've got two hypotheses.

1. Not all food photography is advertising. For example, food magazines: They're not actually selling what's on the cover. They're well within their rights that the covershoot consists entirely of wax models of tomatoes rather than real tomatoes[1]. The same would apply to the Food or Recipes sections in generic lifestyle magazines.

2. The things that are "not the food itself" is interpreted very broadly. As others have noted, you can use white glue for milk if you're hawking cereal. If you're selling tomatoes, you can probably still dip them in wax varnish to make them shine, and add "water" drops made of epoxy to sexy them up[2].

[1] That is to say, "real" wax models, not Roma tomatoes.

[2] I mean "sexy" literally. It's called "food porn" for a reason. The photographic techniques and cinematographic styles are apparently very similar.

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#45

Post by waterlesscloud » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:19 PM UTC

AjithAntony wrote: post #38

ryanwhitney wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You claim they responded transparently and without sugar coating anything. So what was the answer to the original question? Why does the ad burger patty appear thicker and larger? Edit: So many answers talking about how they might make a quarter pound patty look larger. Anyone can do that. I was addressing the fact that the video in no way covers why they look larger in advertisements. Sidestepping the important ques…

She says the retail burger looks smaller because the bun collapsed from the moisture in the enclosed box. She also describes how they arrange the burger to "lean" in the photo, so that might add to the effect. Also the obvious reason would be the one burger was slapped together in 45sec vs. 4-5 hours of meticulous grooming: Selecting the loftiest bun, searing the edges to square up the perimeter of the patty before g…

The perspective created by the arrangement of the buns is probably a big part of it.

I'm not actually sure the meat does look smaller if you lined up the photos to take the optical illusion out of it.

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#46

Post by gilrain » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:19 PM UTC

ryanwhitney wrote: post #26

eykanal wrote: post #21

I'll disagree slightly with tptacek... this is a genius piece of marketing by McDonalds. It does everything that we routinely see listed on this very site as Best Practices™: - Respond to customer feedback in a friendly and highly transparent manner. - Don't sugarcoat things that "everyone knows but no one admits"; they could have avoided showing the graphic artist photoshopping the burger, but everyone knows that th…

You claim they responded transparently and without sugar coating anything. So what was the answer to the original question? Why does the ad burger patty appear thicker and larger? Edit: So many answers talking about how they might make a quarter pound patty look larger. Anyone can do that. I was addressing the fact that the video in no way covers why they look larger in advertisements. Sidestepping the important ques…

I think we can infer that they didn't show all of the tricks they use. While it's true that all the ingredients have to be as sold in the store, there are plenty of tricks... they showed some, but possibly not all.

In the Metafilter thread, someone mentioned that on a styling shoot they'd been on, it appeared to be common practice the butterfly the back of the burger and manipulate it such that the patty appears thicker. I assume by front-loading the bulk of the patty toward the camera.

That may or may not have been done, but it's an example of a trick that abides by the "must be the same stuff as is sold" rule but would still result in a larger-looking patty. I think we can assume that not every little trick made it into the few-minute edit of the few-hour styling process, and likely the tricks selected for the final edit were the least deceptive.

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#47

Post by reledi » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:21 PM UTC

ryanwhitney wrote: post #18

It's a great marketing video for McDonalds, but sidesteps the actual question almost entirely. They respond to "why do your burgers look different in commercials?" by answering "here's the process of making a commercial burger." That doesn't address the fact that a stylist cooked it on a panini grill for an hour looking the perfect brown, leading to a thicker-width burger which indeed makes their advertisements a lie…

> That doesn't address the fact that a stylist cooked it on a panini grill for an hour looking the perfect brown, leading to a thicker-width burger which indeed makes their advertisements a lie.

The patties are usually undercooked as well for the photo shoots, so the meat doesn't shrink as much.

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#48

Post by eykanal » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:23 PM UTC

petermonsson wrote: post #27

eykanal wrote: post #21

I'll disagree slightly with tptacek... this is a genius piece of marketing by McDonalds. It does everything that we routinely see listed on this very site as Best Practices™: - Respond to customer feedback in a friendly and highly transparent manner. - Don't sugarcoat things that "everyone knows but no one admits"; they could have avoided showing the graphic artist photoshopping the burger, but everyone knows that th…

"everyone knows that they use photoshop, so why bother?" I think this is a great comment, but I disagree a bit with the reasoning in this tiny bit of your comment. I think that it is important that they show exactly how much they "cheat" with photoshop because they only "cheat a little". If you're critical of McDonalds, you will assume that they photoshop and that they photoshop a lot. To combat such a misconception…

Very good point, the degree to which they cheat is important, and they took advantage of the video to emphasize that. Smart of them.

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#49

Post by ryanwhitney » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:27 PM UTC

reledi wrote: post #47

ryanwhitney wrote: post #18

It's a great marketing video for McDonalds, but sidesteps the actual question almost entirely. They respond to "why do your burgers look different in commercials?" by answering "here's the process of making a commercial burger." That doesn't address the fact that a stylist cooked it on a panini grill for an hour looking the perfect brown, leading to a thicker-width burger which indeed makes their advertisements a lie…

> That doesn't address the fact that a stylist cooked it on a panini grill for an hour looking the perfect brown, leading to a thicker-width burger which indeed makes their advertisements a lie. The patties are usually undercooked as well for the photo shoots, so the meat doesn't shrink as much.

Interesting to know, but that doesn't make it any less of a lie to show the larger patty.

Re: Why Your McD's Burger Doesn't Look Like the One in the Ad

#50

Post by oz » Wed, Jun 20, 2012, 7:27 PM UTC

My own amusing anecdote:

I grew up in rural Jamaica, where there was no fast food, but I came to the capital city (Kingston) twice per month, where we would always eat at KFC. So I'd never had a burger before (KFC dominates every fast food chain in Jamaica).

When I was maybe 12 or 13, we had a class trip to Kingston, and after the outing, we went to a McDonalds.

So I'm standing in the line, and looking at the ad suspended from the ceiling. I wondered "how in the world could someone eat something so big!" I decided to order it anyway. You only live once.

Imagine my disappointment when the tiny box came back with an even tinier burger. I felt cheated, almost to the point of anger.

Anecdotes aside, this is genius marketing by McDonald. No PR-speak, no cover-up, but rather: "Are the burgers in the ad different from the store? Sure!!! Come on in, let me show you everything. See, we do A, B, and C and that gives us D!" That deflates any possible anger and makes it look like they have nothing to hide.

She deserves a raise.