Wild tricks advertisers use to make food look appealing

boing
21

IIRC, it’s not legal to fake the actual product being advertised, but you can fake all the parts that are “serving suggestions”. So fake milk is fine if you are selling cereal being shown floating in milk, but not if you are selling a specific type of milk. (I speculate that the “Got Milk” ads don’t sell any specific brand or type of milk, and might not be subject to such rules).

I’m less sure about the padding food with cardboard thing, though, because the cardboard doesn’t show - it is just spacing. Perhaps more concerning to me is that when burgers are shown, they will bring the good parts to the front and making an unbalanced,non- representative quantity of ingredients visible, taking them from the back, thus giving a false impression of what the whole burger is made up of.

3 Likes
22

ISTR that on stage, the traditional stand in for ice cream is mashed potatoes I also remember that Campbells got in trouble for using marbles to make the vegetables stay on the top in a photoshoot.

2 Likes
23

First I’ve heard of this :slight_smile: They got in trouble in in 1968, but it looks like the outcome is still a bit murky: “While the FTC does file a lawsuit against Campbell that drags on until 1972, the initial complaint is eventually dropped without requiring Campbell to run corrective advertising.”

3 Likes
24

some of this is less about being deceptive and more about wanting to present something that is how we as humans see it. if i recall, milk doesn’t photograph correctly as far as our eyes are concerned – it’s too blue or something. but glue does, and it has the added benefit of not sogging the cereal or whatever.

4 Likes
25

So we suggest that you serve or cereal with glue, and that motor oil makes an good topping for pancakes. Part of a delicious, balanced breakfast.

4 Likes
26

I was very disappointed with the results when I did photo shoot of my car and used maple syrup instead of motor oil. It didn’t work nearly as well as the other way around.

11 Likes
27

At this level for studio photography? Yeah. Think about it this way. The food stylist needs time to do their thing, make the prop look perfect. Set dressers need to do the same for the set and any non food props. Add another round of that if there’s any people in the shot (including hair, makeup and costume adjustments, blocking and the like). Then you need to light it which takes time as well. And once lit you need to set the cameras, readjust the lighting and so forth.

No one takes one shot, even to capture a single image. So there’s delays for adjustments based between shots. You’re going to be taking multiple shots of of individual products. And shooting multiple products. Because studio space is expensive and can only be booked in 4 hour increments. So you’re doing that multiple times in a row, staging what you can in sequence or over lapping (if you can afford the crew to do so you probably only have one stylist).

Increase the complexity and time for video.

And typical photo and video studios don’t have kitchens. So no fridges, freezers, stoves or what have. How long to you really have with something like ice cream? 5, 10 minutes in open air before it melts? Are you keeping it in a cooler all day with dry ice? Shits a puddle within 30 minutes and it doesn’t stay styled the way you want it for very long at all. Do you just keep scooping new ice cream every few minutes as it melts? Stopping to wipe up spillage?

Thing about the substitutes is they don’t spoil and leave lingering fetid smells for months, make your staff hurl, spread food born illness, and attract roach infestations.

More over the substitutes are stable and have predictable behavior. Milk can curdle or separate. Syrups are thicker when they’re colder and thinner when hot. So something like molasses may not pour at all if it’s too cold. Or pour so thin it doesn’t look like believable molasses. The subs act in predictable ways across temp and time, and they’re stable.

Some times the subs are even food. Like the two big subs for ice cream are Crisco and mashed potatoes. Neither looks very much like ice cream in person. So realistically they don’t look better than the food actually does. But under lighting with careful dressing and camera work they look exactly like ice cream.

I think it’s legally fine if you “accurately represent” the product in question. And there’s not a ton of enforcement. The key question always seems to be whether the product was misrepresented. Not whether the actual product was used.

I keep hammering on the ice cream because it an extreme example where it’s very difficult to use the real product. But almost no ice cream ad ever has featured the actual ice cream.

7 Likes
28

Yeah an apparently the weird translucency of Crisco makes it look more like ice cream or frosting under certain lighting conditions than the real things.

Snow has the same blue issue that milk does. Making shooting snow scenes in actual out door snow difficult. Ivory soap flakes in a studio used to be a common solution. Falling rain doesn’t like to show up on camera unless it’s very heavy. So most of the rain you see in TV and movies is died water shot through sprinklers with carefully controlled lighting. Even for location shoots. The shift to digital and modern white balance makes a lot of this simpler.

But cameras just aren’t accurately recording what’s in front of them, and they don’t function like the human eye.

6 Likes
29

Seems a bit complicated, but the “not a ton of enforcement” seems to be a key driver :slight_smile:

From the American Bar Association:

However, the law requires that photographs, pictures, or models used in an advertisement accurately reflect the product being represented. Colors should not be enhanced, product consistency should not be modified, and quantity or concentration of ingredients should not be adjusted so as to make the product appear more attractive in the advertisement. So, while it is appropriate to use care and effort to ensure that a product presents its best face to cameras, the product should not be manipulated to misrepresent its actual appearance. One major food manufacturer got into trouble by placing clear marbles in the bottom of a bowl of soup used in an advertisement in order to make the soup appear more chunky. In addition to the legal problems this created, the advertiser suffered a lot of bad publicity.

One exception to this general rule is when a product is modified for purposes unrelated to product appearance or performance. For example, mashed potatoes could be substituted for ice cream in a television advertisement showing the joys of eating ice cream (real ice cream would melt under the hot camera lights). On the other hand, mashed potatoes could not be used in an advertisement emphasizing the creamy texture of a particular brand of ice cream.

[emphasis added]

https://apps.americanbar.org/buslaw/blt/2009-05-06/ernst.shtml

Depending on how one reads this it supports both or either of our posts. But, clearly you have lots of direct, real world practical experience about what generally flies in the industry. That the article I cited had to reference the 1968 Campbell’s soup case suggests to me that the deceptive advertising rules are very rarely enforced.

2 Likes
30

Worked in NYC early 80s for a packaging firm and as an intern they had me shlepping some stuff at a food photoshoot w pro stylists and photog (I’m basically a barely sentient pair of extra hands). I think they were shooting steak and I said “can we eat it afterwards?” they all laughed… afterwards, when I saw the shit they were doing to it with blowtorches, motor oil, fake parsley, fake salt and other inedibles, they asked “still want to eat it?” “not hungry, ever again”

10 Likes
31

I’ve only done a little bit of product photography/shooting and no food. But this was all covered pretty heavily in film school and I know more than a few people who do this for a living.

And I used to be a Booker/producer for live and studio video shoots. So I know what a lot of this costs, even at the low end. Doubling up a couple of crew members and crossing the 4 hour mark takes you from a $5k shoot to over $10k. And how time consuming it all is to do right. At the scale I was at noone ever wanted to pay to do it right. But national ad campaigns and big food companies sure as shit do.

It’s one of those grey areas. Since the images involved are fundamentally artificial, real product or not. You can have a situation where using the real food can misrepresent a product deliberately. Or where the real one may not accurately depict it just based on how it reacts to lighting or the camera picks it up.

Imagine an ad about how pure and white Trump brand milk is. As already discussed real milk on film can shoot blue. And it can also look translucent. So for that commercial focusing on color. The real deal may misrepresent it. In that case it should be OK to use fake milk if it’s a better representation of the real product. Or to alter or enhance the color of the real milk you shot.

5 Likes
32

Touching up or ‘faking’ food to make it photograph well is just as legal as retouching someone’s face or adding a bit of Photoshop zing to a photo in post production. If using oil to make a hamburger patty shine shouldn’t be legal, why should it be legal to use CG in movies? After all, if that stuff on the screen isn’t happening for realsies, why should I pay money to see it?

6 Likes
33

Take heart, people. We need no longer worry about all of the photos of fake food the industry uses to create false expectations.

Why, you ask?

Recall the existence of social media websites. The industry’s pitiful attempts have been swept aside by the tsunami of photos of eleventy trillion people’s actual meals, regardless of how poorly composed, arranged, assembled, and otherwise photographed they may have been!

2 Likes
34

Exactly, ice cream is the big thing that’s always faked, because it’s nearly impossible to photograph unless you’re super quick about it.

I used to do a lot of photo shoots for P&G that involved food setups, and all of the tricks in the video are the real deal, except that they usually used cigarette smoke (or incense) for attractive steam, since it’s a lot thicker and photographs better than water steam.

But I’ll also say that there are two kinds of food stylists: ones who rely on trickery and ones that pride themselves on everything being 100% real and edible. That’s super hard to do and the people who do it specialize in specific foods. They’re also more expensive than guys who just use Elmer’s to fake milk.

6 Likes
35

I dunno if that’s a fair assessment. Because which approach you’re gonna use is dictated as much by practicality and what you’re trying to accomplish as by trying to “trick” anybody. So it’s a little unfair to the fake food guy.

And from what I understand some one whose very talented and speciallizes in creating and styling straight up fake, as in made from completely inedible materials, food for these things. Is harder to find and more expensive than any other option. Apparently there’s like one guy who does all the plastic/rubber food for major ad campaigns in the US.

I’d imagine that’s because with that skill set you can probably get more work in special effects. Like I said this stuff isn’t just the realm of food stylist and advertisers. A lot of the food you see in movies and TV shows is “faked” by the same methods. Seems like every actor has a horror story about having to eat Crisco or lard to get a shot.

It’s a bit like sound effects design. The Foley guy playing with coconuts and hitting cabbage with a hammer is not any less talented or respectable than the guy running around with a mic live recording horses running and chewing.

4 Likes
36

I totally agree — both are an art form, just like sfx. I’m speaking more from the perspective of ‘edible’ food stylists, who in my experience look down on ‘inedible’ ones. From a photographer’s perspective, they just want the shot to look great!

3 Likes
37

well ice cream is fifty per cent fat/fifty per cent sugar

38

Who does it better: food stylists, or morticians?

3 Likes
39

IIRC ice in adverts is almost always acrylic or glass.

Likewise bubbles in soda might be glass beads.

And coffee might be watered down soy sauce and gelatin. For people travelling to the US, this will be a serious improvement on the actual coffee served in most restaurants.

5 Likes
40

Well, certainly for the hero shots of booze in a tumbler :slight_smile: The good ones are pricey and over $40 each.

3 Likes