Hamburgers: Ads vs. Reality

Hamburgers and fast food are quite popular in Korea, as this page at Galbijim well demonstrates, so if you live in a city of any decent size you won’t find yourself unable to fix a craving. Of course you will find yourself unable to get a big burger just like the ones in the ads, but in what country isn’t that true?

Well, one muckraking crusader from the Sports Seoul decided to see just how badly the burger chains are hoodwinking us.

In the ads for hamburgers, synonymous with fast food, a series of feasts with piles of fresh ingredients are rolling out. When you go into a fast-food chain the first thing that meets your eye is the series of tantalizing menu ads pasted up everywhere.

The menus appearing in these ads float by one shiny ingredient after another and make your mouth water with their bright colors. But this is as far as your imagination on a joyful meal takes you. The hamburger you ultimately receive after ordering is, to use an oft-used expression, the equivalent of a face without makeup.

In reality, recently an overseas photoblog opened a series of photos called “Fast Food: Advertisements vs. Reality” to the sustained, enthusiastic interest of netizens. The advertising pictures of Burger King, McDonald’s, and Subway’s popular burgers are compared instantly to pictures of the burgers as placed into your hands.

Consumers and everyone have understanding and acceptance that the burgers in ads are not exactly the same as the burgers actually being sold. Ultimately, however, when you directly compare the two pictures the inward thought of “Now that’s just too much!” is hard to put away. It’s fine to show some differences due to factors here and there but some hamburgers look completely different from the way they look in the ads.

I wondered how fast food’s country of origin, the United States, was doing in the Korean environment. This reporter, using a similar method to the foreign blog’s, compared the pictures and actual ingredients of the hamburgers sold in fast food places. The result was the same as that of the examples tested on the overseas blog.

The hamburgers pictured in ads appear extremely delicious while the actual burgers fall rather short of expectations. The burgers sold at Burger King, McDonald’s, KFC, and domestic chain Lotteria were no exception. Song Mo-yang, an office worker in his twenties who enjoys eating fast food, said “When you make your choice from the menu the first thing you see is the ads” and “because of the convenience and flavor I look for the burgers but now there are also times I wonder if this is really the burger I ordered.”

One fast food business’ representative said “When the pictures in the ads are shot, the original ingredients are never exaggerated nor are other ingredients included. It’s an ad, so the point is for attractively-formed food to come out and for it be seen with a dramatic visual presentation.”

In the restaurant there are ads making fantastic claims about their hamburgers. There can’t be a hamburger like the ones in the ads but at minimum the hamburgers for sale have to be like the image in the ads. About that, one regulatory board member said “They say the picture itself is different from the real product but with hamburgers it’s difficult to look at it from a truth in advertising law perspective”, adding “to fall into the category of a misleading ad it must include some content which affects the buying decisions of consumers.”

He went on to say that “For advertisement hamburgers, they’re made in the optimum, best condition for taking photos. There’s no way for it not to be different from the actual burgers wrapped up in stores,” adding “For the first to the last bite, the sequence of ingredients isn’t changed and in that way they are hamburgers fit to be photographed. “Food ads are supposed to make the food look good, that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?”