by Rex Trulove

Created on: June 11, 2009

Have you ever noticed that the mouth-watering food shown on TV commercials and on billboards always looks so much better there than it does when you actually go to the restaurant and order it? There is more than one reason for this, and they are related to the advertising itself.

Advertising has one main purpose; to convince people to use a product. It fulfills this purpose remarkably well, in part because people tend not to think about the details. This is true of all advertising, not just those for fast food.

The author was a restaurant manager for many years, not of fast food restaurants, but the same applies. They were also still chain restaurants. In fact, even on the menu, the actual meals didn't look quite as appetizing as they really were.

Here is what happens: an advertising or marketing firm does the advertising. Advertising, especially for Television, is extremely expensive. The agency knows that the only way they will continue to make money from that company is if they can present the product in such a way that people want to buy it. This makes sense, doesn't it?

So they show attractive and skinny people eating a scrumptious burger and with beautifully cooked, still steaming fries. Some of this is subtle, and some of it not so subtle. People tend to key in on the delicious looking food that was incidentally cooked under ideal conditions. Only, ideal conditions rarely occur, and with advertising as expensive as it is, they can afford to reproduce those conditions over and over until the result looks they way they want it to look.

How about the subtle part? That is the attractive and slender people eating the burger and fries. The message is that if you eat these foods, you don't need to worry about gaining weight. This is nonsense, of course, and most people know it. This is why it is subtle. People often blindly consume the commercial in much the same way they do the fast food, without giving it a thought.

You see a juicy, perfectly cooked burger on TV, covered with a huge slice of tomato, gobs of lettuce, and fairly oozing with sauce. What you get is a preformed burger that tends to be dried out no matter what they do to it, with a tiny bit of lettuce, a thin tomato slice that has seen its better days, and a little dab of sauce. If the advertising agency actually showed that, nobody would buy it in the first place, and the restaurant wouldn't spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in the future, to use the same agency to sell their product.

The deception actually isn't done by the restaurant, but by the advertising agency, for a specific reason. It works, but the restaurant is guilty only of allowing the pictures of that perfect looking food. This isn't the sole domain of fast food by a long shot. When was the last time you saw a normal person, in looks and body weight, in a commercial for a burger? By the same token, when was the last time you saw someone normal and not looking either rich or beautiful/handsome in a car commercial?

Whether people think about it or not, the message is loud and clear. "Buy our burgers and fries, and you will not only have something so delicious you will fight for it, but you will end up slender and good looking if you eat them." You aren't supposed to know it, but this is why fast food never looks as good on commercials than it does on your plate or wrapper, and why it usually looks tastier than it really is. Considering how many millions of these meals are sold, it does appear to work.

Learn more about this author, Rex Trulove.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.