Welcome

Welcome to my blog.

This blog is best read from beginning to end rather than from the newest post to the oldest post.

To begin at the beginning, visit this link.

The purpose of this blog is to educate and inform about food choices and what can either be construed as the evils or the brilliance of the fast food industry's marketers.

The following terminology may aid you as you navigate through these posts. Each of these definitions comes from the textbook Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright.

Happy reading!



Consumer Society: Societies that developed out of the rise of modernity, capitalism, and the wake of the industrial revolution (266).

Interpellation: "The process by which ideological systems call out to or "hail" social subjects and tell them their place in the system. In popular culture, interpellation refers to the ways that cultural products address their consumers and recruit them into a particular ideological position" (446).

Encoding: The production of (intended) meaning in cultural products (439).

Decoding: The process of interpreting and giving meaning to cultural products (437).

C.R.A.P. Principles: Four principles of sound design: Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.

Anti-Ads: Ads that critique popular culture by addressing comodity fetishism, consumerism, and other aspects of consumer societies (300).

Culture Jamming: A term coined by the band Negativland. According to Kalle Lasn, it is, "at root, just a metaphor for stopping the flow of spectacle long enough to adjust your set" (301).

The Gaze: Used to describe the relationship of looking in which the subject is caught in the dynamics of desire through trajectories of looking and being looked at among objects and other people (442).

Marketing of Coolness: A shift in advertising where marketers attempt to attach the "ever-elusive quality of coolness" to their product(s) (293).

Anti-Ads and Culture Jamming

If you feel completely duped by your friendly neighborhood fast food joints' marketing campaigns, you're not alone. What can you do about it? Besides making smarter choices, perhaps you can follow in the footsteps of the anti-ad/culture jamming movement. The following ads are examples of "anti-ads." Rather than advertise a product, these ads aim to critique, usually very harshly.

The first anti-ads and culture jams were literal rewritings of billboards using spray paint. They were intended to reroute messages in order to create new meaning (Sturken and Cartwright 301). Today, they are a "brand" of their own. Some would argue that the fact that they are a brand that is critiquing another brand for being a brand is problematic--but others think that spreading knowledge and criticism cancels out the branding that is being done. Take a look at these examples and you be the judge:

(photo courtesy of responsiblemarketing.com)

(photo courtesy of media.tricities.com)



(photo courtesy of designious.s3.amazonaws.com)

Are these advertisements successful? Do they follow the same principles of the marketing campaigns we have analyzed thus far? By and large, yes. They use attention-grabbing colors and sans serif fonts; they use proximity, alignment, contrast, and repetition; they use imagery that evokes the brand they are critiquing; two use attention-grabbing graphics and one uses stark simplicity. The design elements we have discussed are present all the same, but the messages that are being encoded and decoded are much different. And how are their intended audiences being interpellated?--I would argue that they are being interpellated as being sheep that have followed and followed and followed until one day stumbling across this advertisement and billboard that hopefully will stop them dead in their tracks. These "anti-ads" are aiming to stun. They aim for social change.

Be an educated consumer from now on. Look at the fine print, and use the principles in this blog to see how marketers are (trying to) manipulate you. Advocate for change. Make a fuss about things that outrage you--maybe bringing these things to light will enforce a movement of global change to some degree.

Marketing Sex

Using sex as a marketing ploy is the oldest trick in the book, and one I won't spend too much time discussing. As consumers, we have become desensitized to the hyper sexual messages thrown at us everyday. Nothing really seems to shock us anymore, but since it's been proven that sex sells, marketers continue to successfully market products to us using sex, and sex continues to permeate our culture in every way.

The following ads speak for themselves. Both the McDonald's and the Burger King ad objectify women. They succeed by their intended "shock value."

(photo courtesy of blogspot.com)

As I previously mentioned, we seem to be shocked by less and less these days, but every once in a while, an ad comes along that pushes those boundaries. The result is something similar to this Burger King ad. Advertisers have to keep overstepping their boundaries more and more if their intended shock value is going to succeed.

(photo courtesy of entrepeneurgoddess.com)

In the spirit of "no press is bad press," even if an ad like this gets pulled early on because it is too outrageous, it can still be a success. The more people that are talking about it, the more successful the ad can become. In a lot of ways, scandal like that is better than the ad receiving no additional airplay.

Similar to the ad in the previous post that marketed "coolness," these ads perpetuate gender stereotypes. More specifically, a concept called "the gaze." Binary oppositions, like man/woman and masculine/feminine, help us to make sense of our world by knowing everybody's place. According to Practices of Looking, the famous philosopher Jacques Derrida has argued that, "all binary oppositions are encoded with values and concepts of power, superiority, and worth" (111).

How are women defined then, according to these ads?

As I stated earlier: they are objectified. They are made into submissive, passive, powerless objects. Men are strong and women are weak. Men are powerful and women are not.

If this seems old fashioned or sounds like a patriarchy to you, why do you allow these norms to perpetuate by continuing your role in these consumer societies? Probably because you never even realized that all of this was going on. It's amazing (and frightening) what a good marketing rep can do.

Interpellation, Gender, and Indulgence

Fast food advertisers are not dumb: they are aware that the food they are marketing to you is unhealthy, and they are aware that there is an emphasis now more than ever before on healthy eating habits. If you know their food is bad, how do they trick you to purchase it?

They use the rhetoric of indulgence. The message they encode is as simple as this: "We know our food is bad for you, but don't you deserve to do something nice for yourself? We know you work hard. Why not kick back and enjoy some tasty junk food tonight?"

Observe the following ad:

(photo courtesy of blog.news-record.com)

This advertisement warns consumers to be "prepared." The marketers are encoding their food to come across as vicious, monstrous, and beastly because it can "sense fear." It is a larger-than-life burger loaded with meat and cheese. There is no way the advertisers can even pretend that this is healthy, so they must interpellate their audience in a different way.

This ad taps into stereotyped gender roles to a very high degree. It would not be ladylike for a female to consume this product because as a culture, we have certain expectations about women. We expect and want them to be submissive, dainty, fragile, and quiet. We don't expect them to eat something that is encoded in this manner.

However, we do expect men to consume something that is encoded in this manner. We expect men to be aggressive and strong. It is accepted in our society for a man to eat excessively or less healthily than a woman because of the gender expectations we have. It is a testament to one's manhood if he can walk up to the plate and ravage a burger. If a man eats this burger, it is expected that he will feel like more of a man. And he deserves to feel that way--at least, according to the marketing team behind this ad campaign.

Interpellation (cont.)

Now that we have a fundamental understanding of what interpellation is, let's look at a few ads that utilize the concept.

The first is an ad campaign run by Wendy's. Take a look:

(photo courtesy of brandautopsy.typepad.com)

Here, Wendy's is trying to appeal to an audience of people that are trying to lose weight. There are very few people that wouldn't like to lose a few pounds, so by whittling down a "target audience," Wendy's has successfully included a majority of Americans. This advertisement speaks to anybody who wants to lose weight or is currently trying to lose weight, as well as speaking to members of gyms, people looking to join a gym, or people that want to lose weight but don't have the time (or especially the money) for a gym membership. This advertisement essentially advertises that Wendy's is a diet alternative that is better than a gym membership because it costs less. While they may not be advertising their burgers and fries, they are advertising chili and a baked potato alongside the salad. Last I checked, baked potatos and chili are not the most sure-fire ways to lose weight.

But this advertisement works because it speaks to people that want reassurance that skipping the gym is okay, even when they're trying to lose weight. The ideology of wanting to lose weight but not necessarily doing the work is therefore reinforced, and an audience is therefore interpellated. This analysis of the content of the ad complements our previous analysis of its design principles and typography.

The following Burger King ad accomplishes something very similar:

(photo courtesy of nutritionresearchcenter.org)

The marketers are assuming that the audience is primarily working class, or perhaps college-aged. What makes this ad different from the previous Wendy's ad is the way in which the projected audience is analyzed. The Wendy's ad makes mention of both health and cost, whereas the Burger King ad does not aim to be health-conscious whatsoever, but merely mentions cost-related issues, like being able to both pay rent and eat. While this ad is primarily targeted at working class Americans, there can also be crossover. Most people, whether strapped for cash or not, enjoy saving money. The last time you bought something on sale, you probably felt accomplished--as a people, we seem to love bargains! Even if you're not a renter and you do have enough money for food, this ad might catch your attention because it implies bargains and deals. Therefore, this audience is interpellated as being either working class or college-aged, but the secondary audience is interpellated as those that like to save money.

As a side note, it is also interesting that this ad uses both blue and yellow. My personal interpretation of that is that they are clearly using the yellow to boost appetite (see the Color post for more information), and the blue is used not to suppress appetite, but to produce a calming effect. The marketers are assuming that their audience doesn't have a disposable income, so the blue might calm their concerns while also welcoming them to their local Burger King, as if to say, "we understand your concerns here, and here, our food is affordable."

This should probably strike you as being "false advertising" at this point.

Interpellation

In the textbook Practices of Looking, interpellation is defined as a way of referring to, "the ways that cultural products address their consumers and recruit them into a particular ideological position" (446). For the purposes of this blog, interpellation, then, is the methods in which advertisers and technical writers situate their audience by furthering an ideology they believe their audience already participates, or should participate, in.

This method is helpful to marketers because it narrows down a target audience by using sometimes very general principles. Good writing is always aimed at an audience. When was the last time you purchased a product that didn't seem to be aimed directly at your demographic? Writers and advertisers are skilled at making it appear that a product is tailor-made to fit your exact needs and desires, while at the same time opening up the venue for a broad audience to participate in whichever ideology they are touching on in their ad. The more personalized a product feels, and the more a consumer feels that his/her needs are addressed, the more likely it is that that consumer will purchase a product or participate in a community.

Along with interpellation comes "encoding" and "decoding"--basically, encoding is the way a writer/marketer/advertiser intended a message to be absorbed, and decoding is the way it is actually absorbed by a consumer. Everybody decodes differently, and encoding and decoding don't always match up as well as an advertiser would like.

Given this overview, we will examine two ad campaigns in the next post that use the principles of interpellation, encoding, and decoding.

C.R.A.P. Principles

The C.R.A.P. principles are four elements of sound design. They stand for:

Contrast
Repetition
Alignment
Proximity

Documents that utilize these principles are often aesthetically pleasing and overall successful. The technical writers and designers of the ads we have already looked at do a good job of employing these design principles as a means of successful design tactics.

(photo courtesy of marketingly.com)

In this McDonald's billboard, the first noticeable C.R.A.P. principle at work is contrast. The contrast between the background and the text could only be more severe if the background were black, but this dark brown is very close to that.

Another principle at work is alignment. At first glance, the text of the billboard seems to be centered, but it is obvious by the second line ("now serving espresso.") that the text is left-justified. This alignment is successful because it is interesting and makes sense. As readers, we are accustomed to left alignment. Many amateur documents are designed around center alignment, and these documents often fail in the aesthetics department.

The alignment also sets up another design principle, proximity. Everything on the billboard is proximal--the only thing separated from the "main content" is the logo, which should makes sense as a separate entity.

Repetition is another C.R.A.P. principle present in this billboard. All of the text is in the same font, even the "i'm lovin' it" in the logo in the bottom right. Additionally, all of the text is in lowercase type, and in both lines of text in the center of the billboard, the final word of the sentence is in bold. With such a small amount of text, repetition like this is a wise design choice. A designer does not want to assault a viewer of the document too much. A billboard is seen from the road and should not be too distracting, nor do viewers have an extensive amount of time to read and analyze it. It is a quick, to-the-point message with visual appeal.

Each ad we have looked at thus far can be analyzed in this same way. The C.R.A.P. principles are just another piece to the puzzle of how technical writers and advertisers (very successfully) manipulate us without our even knowing. If something is pretty to look at, won't we look at it more? And perhaps even internalize the message instead of letting it bounce off our daily advertisement filter?

Typography

You may not realize this, but there is a science as to how our eyes absorb letters.

When we read, our eyes glide over the letters much easier if the font is a serif font. A standard serif font (think Times) is used for much of our prolonged reading--textbooks, newspapers, Web sites, etc. It should come as no surprise, then, that it is sans serif fonts (think Verdana) that catch our attention. Sans serif fonts are void of the little "feet" at the tops and bottoms of serif font lettering that makes the letters appear to bleed together. It is these "feet" and the shapes of the words that we recognize. Our eyes barely have to try; we are programmed to recognize word shapes.

Sans serif fonts are a different story. They come in a whole host of sizes and types. Their shapes can be much more difficult to recognize. Sans serif fonts are often used in headlines for this reason. Just like the color red, the job description of a sans serif font is to catch our attention, to trip us up and force us to read rather than to look.

Take a look at the following ad and notice how Wendy's utilizes this principle.

(photo courtesy of http://brandautopsy.typepad.com)

The blocky sans serif font forces our eyes to work. Wendy's has a very specific message they are trying to feed their potential customer in this advertisement (which will be analyzed in a later post), and in order to make sure that the message has the biggest chance of seeping into the brains of the biggest amount of people possible, Wendy's made the executive decision to choose a font that is different, a font whose letters don't make it easy for our eyes to glide past them on autopilot.

If you take notice of the past two advertisements for McDonald's and Steak 'n Shake, they, too, utilize a sans serif font as an attention grabber.

McDonald's, Steak 'n Shake, and Color

(photo courtesy of http://www.adamseal.com)

It is pretty difficult to avoid red. In fact, you almost have to go out of your way to avoid something that is red. In our culture, we consider red to be the color of a lot of severe things--it is the color of warnings (stop signs and traffic lights), it is the color of love and romance (Valentine's day hearts), it is the color of blood. Editors have traditionally marked with red pen because it asserts authority.

So what is red doing with my McDonald's cheeseburger? Simply trying to get my attention. It is a jarring color, not a calming one. Worth noting is that the largest graphic on the page is the golden arches--not only a spectacular branding, because it is such a ubiquitous and recognizable feature, but also a great opportunity to incorporate a splash of yellow, a color that has been proven to increase appetite.

(photo courtesy of http://2.bp.blogspot.com)

Above is another example of the use of yellow in an advertisement. This is actually a photo of a Steak 'n Shake place mat setting. It is assumed that if a customer is already sitting at a table inside a Steak 'n Shake, they are probably already hungry. This may be the visual that tips them over the edge--perhaps they've just got to have this Wisconsin Buttery Steak Burger and Fries. Even the french fries look enhanced by photoshop--they are looking especially yellow here. Hungry yet?

Interestingly, the background to the left is blue. Blue is proven to decrease appetite, which contradicts with the yellow that increases appetite. This case of the use of blue is a bit different than the standard usage, however, because the blue seems to comprise the sky in what appears to be a farm scene. There is also a landscape of vivid green grass. It all seems very natural--fresh cheese, fresh beef, nothing unhealthy about it, even the "buttery" part, right?

Did you notice that the "New!" is in red? Once again, grabbing our attention.

Food Ads and You

Americans are two things: they are workaholics, and they are obese. And there is a correlation between the two. Who has time to put a fresh dinner on the table anymore, anyway? Why not just run through the drive-thru on the way home and pick up a few Happy Meals for the kids...


We are bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands, of advertisements each day. Luckily, we have become immune. We now know how to filter, completely subconsciously, because there is an invisible barrier between what ads are being shot at us and what ads we are actually absorbing. But who can resist a juicy, greasy cheeseburger? especially if it is being sold with sex, or even being sold with color, to spark our attention?

Advertisements cost money. Lots and lots of money. And time is money. Corporations cannot afford to waste their or our time with their ads. Each color has meaning, each word and each sound. Sadly, most of us are put under a spell and are completely unaware of the effect food advertisements have on us.

Why does McDonald’s have golden arches? Why are so many print advertisements printed in red? Do font choices have anything to do with it? The answers may not shock you, but you may feel deceived. With slogans like “I’m lovin’ it,” haven’t we come to expect a friendly giant from our neighborhood Micky D’s? They did stop using trans fats, didn’t they?—shouldn’t we be patting them on their backs?