News

McDonald's explains why burgers in ads look different in real life

In a bid for transparency, McDonald's released a video this week explaining why its burgers look different in advertisements than they do in real life.

In the video, Hope Bagozzi, the company's Canadian marketing director, shows the behind-the-scenes process of a quarter pounder photo shoot, where the food is prepared by a "food stylist" and a graphic designer doctors the image in Photoshop. That's compared, side by side, to an un-doctored quarter pounder bought from a McDonald's restaurant.

"Here, you can definitely see that there's a size difference," Bagozzi says. "The box that our sandwiches come in keep the sandwiches warm, which creates a bit of a steam, in fact, and it does make the bun contract a little bit. And then the main difference is the fact that we actually took all the ingredients that are normally hidden under the bun and we pulled them to the foreground so that you can see them."