Advertising and Imagery: Big Mac Attack! Essay

The health dangers represented by excessive consumption of true tenderheartednessed food such(prenominal) as that marketed by McDonalds, though gaining increased recognition today, remain for the most part unknown or unacknowledged by a great some(prenominal) sectors of the American pubic. This is the premise which motivated the image pictured in Adbusters and subjected to word of honor hither. Entitled Big Mac Attack, the advertisement parody featured hither uses dark humor rather than dry statistical information in order to drive home the point to fast food lovers and the superior general public that fast food leads to high cholesterol, high blood public press and heart disease.The ads subject is a surgery room, which does not in any direct way seem to address the images associated with fast food. With an electrocardiogram monitor occupying the left hand foreground, the counterbalance-bound background shows a atomic number 101 and an assistant poring over an unseen heart patient. From the perspective of the viewer, the patients feet are visible, poking morbidly from the blanket covering the otherwise obscured body. The corking right angle of the EKG monitor cuts in diagonally from off-screen, with the in all of the machine not totally visible.The bottom horizontal tenor forming the right angle serves to underline the lone print featured on the screen. The say Big Mac Attack is featured here, as though a part of the EKG display. On the lower register of the vertical line in the right angle, a perpindicular line indicates the front edge of the slenderize bed frame. With almost perfect symmetry, the patients visible feet are angled outward and centered in this portion of the image. The two surgeons flanking him terminate this symmetrical impression.Other shapes maintain the rigid consistency of the image, such as the chart dangling from the bed and the operating lamp hanging just in a higher place the patient. The lone point of distinction fr om this rigid angular orientation is in the distinguishing bid of value. This is the image of the so-called Golden Arches, which have been superimposed into the heart monitor read-out shown on the EGK machine. Here, the familiarity of the McDonalds logo serves against the companys image-management.Without personation any of the themes such as fun, family and deliciousness that divine service it to sell its dent name, the ad invokes McDonalds by using its household logo. This is sufficient to help clarify the purpose of the set of displayed images. Additionally, the farcical tone of the work becomes more apparent here. The faded and morose quality of the imagery here is disrupt only by the swooping image and its attendant colors. Indeed, the chromatic contrast here intended also plays a significant part in contrive the impression to be peen from the work.Specifically, the bleak blue, white and gray which fog over the patient and his physicians, sharply supplemented by the mi dnight blue and black hues of the EKG monitor, drive home a sense of impending doom. In the center of this, the red and yellow elements of the Golden Arches allow this part of the image to draw the focus of attention. This underscores the value of the work, which is driven by both its criticism of the harvest-festival in question and its exploitation of the success which McDonalds has enjoyed as a tremendously marketed brand icon.The composition is thusly conveyed, presenting the rather explicit statement that fast food can be deadly. Moreover, we are lead by the medium and approach to suggest that the authors of the ad parody also call up that McDonalds advertising supremacy has been a direct contributing ingredient to the public health hazard represented by the public. This is, if nothing else, a small attempt recontextualize the brand image to meet public health rather than retail aims.