As soon as I saw this week’s prompt, I knew I would end up writing about one of the most recent Hardees’ commercials for their “Mile High Bacon Thickburger” which has been playing frequently on several television channels since September (their YouTube account uploaded it on September 25th).
Here's a link to see the commercial for yourself.
So in case you didn't know anything about Hardees, it's an american restaurant chain that's been around since the 1960s. They are also notorious for using the female body in their advertisements in order to entice their predominately male audience into purchasing burgers from their restaurants.
In this commercial, titled 'PROPOSITIONING', one could argue that at least two of the seven deadly sins were demonstrated and used as devices to persuade the audience that they should buy a Mile High Bacon Thickburger®. Lust and gluttony are the most obvious sins demonstrated, but I would like to argue that avarice is also used in the commercial, just to a smaller scale.
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I'm a little worried that boys will start associating hunger hand in hand with lust... Pavlov conditioning anybody?
But seriously, that would be such an uncomfortable mix of feelings, good luck to them. |
The commercial depicts an upper class, white, heterosexual couple on an airplane. The woman of the pair was deliberately wearing a dress suit top, cut low enough to display her cleavage. She then asks if he wants to, "join the mile high club," which of course has sexual connotation, but he declines. When she turns to the other guy, a white man that's dressed professionally, she asks the same thing, however, this time the camera is positioned to make sure both her face and her cleavage take the center of the screen, which is usually the center point of concentration when it comes to the layout of an image. The guy nods, and we all know where he's looking.
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| Who cares about eye contact? Not this gentleman. |
Then, to their target audience's amusement and to everyone else's relief she pulls out two of those massive burgers.
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| Hey look! Eye contact restored.. I can't tell if he's disappointed or if he's just like "whatever, this works too.." |
Keeping in mind the size and the name of the burger, it seems safe to say that everything about the product is excessive, and thus gluttony is revealed to be another persuasive device they are using. Avarice can kind of be seen, when their wardrobe is taken into consideration along with this idea that the consumer can get a massive meal for pretty cheap. Of course, the advertisement swings back into lust, when the camera pans over to the woman eating.
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| Who actually eats like that. Get a napkin or something, what the heck. |
So if this description didn't make you feel uncomfortable, maybe it just so happens you are a part of their target audience, and if that's the case you probably want one of those, misleading, Mile High Thickburgers®.
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| I would just like to point out that this is not a mile high, contrary to popular belief, and, also, chances are when you buy the burger it won't shimmer in the sunlight/moonlight/florescent lighting quite as well as they'll have you believe.... |
I immediately thought of these commercials too, except the Paris Hilton Texas BBQ Thickburger one. However, these two Hardees commercials are very similar at the core. I really liked how you took screen shots of the most important stills from the commercial. It really helped illustrate your point. I also liked how you went further than the two obvious sins and also argued avarice. (And your comments in the small text were fantastic)
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you, and I've definitely noticed a lot of lust coming into play with fast food commercials, which has really been quite confusing to me. I never really thought that food or gluttony would be in anyway connected to lust in the media, but I've seen it more and more often. (I think that your arguments for all of the sins were really strong, and I was totally loving the captions.) I think it's kind of weird that the fast food industry would try to connect this higher, perfect class to their cheap food, especially if they were trying to sell to people with a lower budget, but hey, if it works. Maybe they were trying to say even rich, beautiful people want it? I dunno if I had a ton of money I wouldn't be eating at Hardee's. I probably also wouldn't take it on an airplane, but what'evs.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Margaret, I love the use of images with captions dude.
ReplyDeleteIt's just bizarre how much fast food companies are trying to sexualize their foods. The only company I haven't noticed doing it is McDonald's, but I'm not gonna let em off the hook just for that considering that they're a predatory capitalist institution who thinks that hiring women and minorities and paying them far below what is needed to survive in most areas of America is somehow progressive.
But yeah, good blog post! I thought it was really good how you thought to talk about how the camera angles emphasize certain things in the commercial and shift the focus.
Also I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't allow that on an airplane.