Fast Food Industry Essay

Daniel Zurita
Professor, Brian Waychoff
SPE 245
May/19/2014

How does fast food advertisement target its audience?

Fast food advertising helps promote fast food products throughout various parts of media such as magazines, commercials, billboards, social media, celebrity’s endorsement, and much more. Out of the advertisement in the United States, fast food represents one of the most heavily marketed industries. Fast food advertisements such as McDonald’s focus more on children. McDonalds and Burger King, huge fast food restaurants. These two companies target children by having happy meals that provide toys, which relate to children’s films that have recently been released. According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation article Fast food television ads use toys, and movies to target kids, the companies are also responsible for most of the ads for children’s meal. Sixty nine percent of the children meal advertisement feature toy giveaways fifty five percent have to deal with movies. McDonalds also has the forty percent of their 44,062 ads aimed at kids. Seventy one percent of fast food are aimed at kids through four channels which are Cartoon Network with thirty two point three percent, Nickelodeon with eighteen point three percent, Disney X with sixteen point two percent, and Nicktoons with twelve point four percent. They also have a clown, named Ronald McDonald, an advertising mascot that the company has used since 1963. The clown was meant to attract children and entertain them, giving parents a reason to bring their children parent to the restaurant to purchase the meals. The company also provides playgrounds, and games for children. This is something that I experienced as a child; I enjoyed going in there just to try and collect the toys. Fast food companies also use video games in their websites to attract children. Wendy’s and McDonalds used mobile application to target children with games. One of their games is “Mc Play,” and “Pet Play Games”. This is according to Fast Food Targeted marketing from 2012-2013. In the Article “Fast Food Ads: Kids Seeing Less On TV, More on Social Media” a lot of advertising that used to appear on websites is moving to Facebook. Also six billion advertisements appeared in social networks in the year of 2012. Now fast food companies go far beyond the realm of commercials, they are putting their name on big events that millions would watch, such as the super bowl, or basketball finals or playoffs, the soccer world cup, any other sport or movie awards, music awards and much more. Such as the super bowl according to the NBC news Yum! Brand spend 67.8 million dollars on the super ball from 2002-2011 Yum brand is one of the largest fast food companies and it has KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut under its belt. Also McDonald’s spend $988 million dollars in 2013 on advertising or in other words 2.7 million a day, which is crazy, no wonder I’m always craving for a big mac. Now that we are talking about sports we can say that athletes themselves promote food from fast food industry such as subway which many think its good for you just because they used a fat guy by the name of Jared Fogle as the spokesman for the company, he is known for loosing a massive amount of weight by following the subway diet. Did the man get a lot of attention yes many people want to enjoy a good diet and lose weight it did get peoples attention and now subway has 37,000 locations around the world. They did a great job putting out their with jared and showing his results and also used other athletes such as basketball player Blake Griffin, Olympians Michael Phelps, Apolo Anton Ohno, and many more athletes. Fast food advertisement use the billboards to sent the message directly to their target. For example they would put an offer that would make people want something from that specific company. Such as a billboard saying four buck is dumb now serving expresso from McDonalds, or five dollar foot long from

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