Fast Food Billboards
Everyday you hop into the car, odds are that you’re going to drive past a burger about 40 feet off the ground that dwarfs your vehicle. The hamburgers of billboard fame are surely going to be so beautifully presented it might provoke the question; “Have I been eating them wrong this whole time?” This is one of the most common attributes of the fast food company’s billboard. The “Picasso burger,” as I have just coined, is the consistent seller of meat patties in the eyes of the brands and agencies.
Using this simple imagery is driven by a pretty basic principle, and that is to create a craving. Eating is a necessity of life, so the motivation of using the most delicious, towering, stack of meat and bread possible is to make them hungry, therefore selling their product.
The amount of work that goes into these types of ads is of course undeniable, but on the other hand the creativity required for this genre is significantly less than some ways that advertising has begun to advance with technology. There is less deciphering of the message needed by the viewer (consumer) when seeing the typical fast food ad. These billboards are quite typically basic, and this is on purpose. The interaction that the average consumer has with a billboard ad is that of passing by. This creates a much shorter window for a portion of information to be noticed, read, deliberated and decided on. The agencies and companies responsible for these ads must then adhere to a couple of steps that become transparent upon researching variations of fast food billboard ads, in order to achieve the most amount of adherence, in the shortest amount of time.
One of these features I’ve already talked about, that being the Picasso Burger. The next feature that is a clear commonality between these types of ads is that of the bright colours. If the biggest burger you’ll seee that day won’t catch your eye, then surely the bright colours and sharp contrasts of the billboard will. The same principles that are attached to the logos of these companies, are extended to the billboard in an effort to draw the viewer in. Even the onion, tomato and lettuce on the above Whopper, are strategically placed in order to create a stark contrast.
The third aspect one could draw from that has continuity between different billboards within the genre is the sense of simply copy. Again preching to the idea that these billboards are created to get a message noticed and understood easily, the simple but deliberate copy plays a pivotal role. Whether its to notify the viewer of a new product, or of a ongoing deal, the copy is to the point, often brightly coloured and bolded in the places that are most attention grabbing.
The inherent qualities of all these billboards are quite directly reflective of the environment of which the operate in for the most part. Today people are quite often driven by speed and price, more commonly than quality, which is the principle of majority of fast food restauarants around the world. These billboards are a fast sell for an even faster industry. But much like everything we interact with, even within the genre of fast food billboard advertising there are outliers. A great creative piece always stands out in a crowd no matter how many bold colours or Picasso Burgers are used. If only the motivation was always to have the best creative work, and not adhere to standards set before.
