Food advertising and Obesity

Advertising
Some people see fast food advertisements as false advertising because the products in the images ALWAYS look better than the food served on your plate at the restaurant. These "sexy" food images are the product of good advertising. I don't believe that it's the advertising agencies fault for causing the increase in obesity. They are paid to advertise the products, so they do their job. Speaking realistically, if the MacDonald's BigMac  was portrayed as the one they serve at the restaurant, who would want to eat it? If it looks like it's made of fresh ingredients, consumers are going to CONSUME it. There are clearly more fast food restaurants advertising their food than organic/natural food products.

Consumers
The consumer has a choice whether to eat or not eat fast food. Advertising agencies have NO control over that. If the agencies made fast food seem disgusting, no one would buy it, therefore they would not make any money out of their ads. The fact that process food commercials take up 50% of kids television shows is not the main cause for obesity. In my personal opinion, if you let your kids eat MacDonald's and sit at home watching cartoons all day, it's your fault as a parent to have let your kids become fat and lazy. The amount of exercise has drastically decreased in today's society. It is souly up to the parents to promote healthy eating habits and exercise for their children.

Photoshop: Nay or yay?

Personally, I think that this is a very touchy subject and all depends on circumstance and what the photo is advertising.

Metaphorically

I believe that photoshop can be used to portray a metaphor depending on the circumstance. In makeup advertisements, the woman modelling for the product tends to look "perfect" because they want you to believe that their product will make you look perfect and beautiful. I find that this is perfectly acceptable because quite frankly, if the woman  modelling for a coverup foundation has freckles and sun spots, it gives the consumer the image that their brand doesn't do its job efficiently. In this sense, this could be seen as "false advertisement".

Photoshop Fails

Photoshop can also seem foreign in the terms of portraying realism to the consumer. Advertisements for clothing brands such as Victoria Secret tend to be seen as false or fake. The models you see displaying the underwear are surreal and almost god like. By this, I mean the woman are perfect. To the consumers, this is rather intimidating because the average woman isn't 5'8-6 feet tall or have D cup breasts, flat stomach and perfect facial features. In this respect, photoshop has been overused in a negative way. Young women now believe that if they don't look like the girls on the covers of magazines, they are ugly. 

Good photography should only need moderate retouching, not changing the picture entirely to look like something/someone else.

The Mic Mac Mall Back to School Campaign

Regarding this campaign, I honestly think that the message is completely sexist and demeaning towards women. The way they designed their campaign was poorly thought out and executed. Firstly, a Back to School campaign should not be souly directed towards women considering that school is unisex. Secondly, they executed their designs using very insulting stereotypes. The messages they use to advertise back to school shopping suggest that women are nothing but a pretty face. They make women seem as if they are incompetent in subjects such as science and social studies. 

Whether they included young men in their ads, judging on the way they executed them, they would still receive negative feedback from viewers. I think that it would be insulting either way. In my personal opinion, I think that they should completely redesign and plan their campaign in a nondestructive way.

In this particular case, I don't think that the agency gets shoppers at all. The reasons being that:

1. They are only targeting half of the school population

2. They aren't sending the right message across

3. Their ads are insulting

I think ultimately this campaign turned away many consumers, or at least made them think twice about shopping at the mall. The fact that they donated a cheque of $5000 helped with their apology, but I think that there will always be a black mark on their reputation.

Regarding the ads on The Mic Mac Mall's Facebook page and website, I find these advertisements to be a little less insulting towards the intelligence and school priorities of women, but I still find them to be a little offensive considering that shopping is not only for women. They have failed to consider the possibility of shopping to be unisex.