Mixed Signals: McDonald's, Photoshop, and Why We're Lovin' It

Mixed Signals is Erin Straza’s weekly musing about marketing miscellany in advertising, branding, and messaging.

Psst. Have you heard?

McDonald’s is coming clean.

That delicious burger you see in its ads? The one with the cheese melting and the mustard and ketchup dripping?

It’s not your average McDonald’s hamburger. All the components are the same—bun, burger, condiments—but the execution of a drive-through burger is nothing compared to the rigorous assembly of a burger heading to advertising fame. The burgers that make it big have been specially groomed, prepped, and staged.

That’s right—staged. Food stylists have doted on it. Put it’s best side forward. Shined the light at the right angle. Used a mini-torch to melt the cheese a bit more. Applied ketchup and mustard with syringes. But even all this work isn’t enough to make it ad-ready. Next comes the Photoshop enhancements, where the bun’s imperfections are smoothed and the pickle gets a high gloss shine. McDonald’s explains this intensive process for us here:

One analyst decries that with this detailed video describing the photo shoot process, McDonald’s has destroyed the illusion of advertising. But after the many previous advertising debacles resulting from manipulated imagery in almost every sector, I can’t agree that McDonald’s has brought the whole system down. We have long known what the advertising machine would churn out: images of uber-perfection to create an impossible reality from which we measure our happiness.

We want bodies without jiggle and eyelashes like feathers and burgers with flawlessly placed onions.

It’s not a real world, but we want it, because we’ve seen it with our own two eyes. And this allure keeps us ever seeking that magical outfit, beauty product, and comfort food.

This is nothing new, really. The first campaign to play on the human state of discontent had Adam and Eve as the focus. The serpent nudged them to try the one fruit they were missing out on. He painted a tempting picture of uber-perfection, a world in which Adam and Eve would be like God. He told them they would be happier if they consumed the fruit that was a true delight to the eyes.

That’s how these campaigns work. We see images that are clearly manipulated, but our hearts are drawn to the impossibility of that experience. So we keep seeking its fulfillment, sampling one product after another.

Has McDonald’s destroyed the illusion of advertising? I don’t think so. We believe so strongly in the illusion we won’t abandon these products, even when they don’t deliver.

The illusion of advertising works, because we want it to.