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…
> The only honest answer to the original question is the obvious one: because their normal burgers look like crap.
...how is "the burger on the ad is designed to show what's in the burger, the one you eat is designed to be eaten" not an honest answer?
I don't even understand why people in USA go to McDonalds etc. I mean, if you want good burgers, USA is the paradise for them. E.g. while visiting Berkeley, one random burger joint called Bongo Burger was better than any burger I've eaten in Europe. I don't know how is it in smaller cities, but I would guess an American should know what's a good burger and what's complete rubbish.
To add insult to injury, there's a McDonald's within a few blocks of Bongo Burger (at Center St.) that's enormous and always packed. I'm not sure if we see this behavior because Americans are addicted to empty calories, or just don't want to venture outside their (dis)comfort zone to try something new, or what. It's sad.
The point of eating at McDonald's is not to get the world's best burger. It's to get a McD burger which always tastes the same no matter where you are. They don't really even taste like regular burgers, they taste like McDonald's burgers. People aren't dumb, they know approximately what the burger at Bongo (or wherever) will taste like. But you have to figure out what they put on the burger, what to drink, etc. At McD you get the same thing every time, no fuss. It's much less cognitive load to eat at McDonalds, plus it's almost certainly cheaper. Everybody has their reasons.
Ever been to Japan? The burgers and fries at McDonalds there are not lukewarm or squished like you get here in America, rather they're hot, toasted, and all puffed up.
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…
When they show the image that is half prepared burger and half store bought burger (3:20), you can see that they're almost exactly the same height. We perceive the store bought one to be smaller because it has cheese covering up most of the patty and melted on (whereas the prepared one has the cheese resting on top), it's darker/less vibrant, and the bun is hugging the patty tightly, which makes the patty seem smaller when compared to the space provided by all of the toppings in the specially prepared burger.
The subtext I'm communicating is, "if I was in the food marketing industry, I sure would want to communicate to the world that I was legally obligated to adhere to some strict code of conduct". It's a credibility booster. So I'm going a step further and seeing if anyone can use an advanced legal tool like Google or Wikipedia to find the place that says McDonalds must-absolutely-must use real pickles or exactly the re…
In re Campbell Soup Co. , 77 F.T.C. 664 (1970). It took all of 2 minutes to find the case. You have to know where to look. The case is not available digitally for free or as part of subscriptions to legal research databases to Lexis, Westlaw, etc. It is available digitally if you are willing to pay for individual access to the case; price varies depending on the LRD used. Note that the FTC has not ever actually issue…
That probably supports tptacek's contention (apologies if not your contention) that actual, specific rules do not really exist?
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 susp…
This is standard advertising practice across many industries and not unique to McDonald's. Examples include food (both restaurants and specific products like breakfast cereal), cosmetics, health products, even real estate. McDonald's really does push it very far though, in terms of disparity between the imagery and the actual product.
I suppose it falls under the "fake it till you make it" category of business practices.
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.
Which doesn't make the ads any less shammy. "Here is a representation of the product produced in a way that is nothing like the actual process to produce said product in an attempt to make the product look better than it actually is". Hmmm...