Food Ad Critiques

It's time to critique some magazine food ads. Fortunately I have a massive supply of food and lifestyle magazines hidden under my mattress, so I pulled a few out and scanned in some ads.

This Lindt chocolate ad is all about looking clean and crisp. Most chocolate ads seem to be like this. Probably because people don't want to think of any grime sticking to their precious sweets (and in ads, chocolate looks very similar to a certain other brown substance). Most people figure that messy does not equal classy - therefore ads that are presented as chaotic (ie - messy) are left for kid's cereals and potato chips (but not those "classy" chips that cost 10c more than regular chips).

Anyway, showing a single Lindt chocolate being hand made on top of a (supposedly) marble table looks classy (although I am aware that it is somewhat tongue in cheek). Also, just having a single slogan of text keeps things easy to read.

It has warm chocolaty colours behind the chef (chocolate maker?) and the chocolate itself has a good rich brown colour (which is more than likely CG). The gold text adds to this colour scheme. I'd guess that the box shot itself is also CG, simply because it is simpler to get more different angled, perfectly lit shots through digital rendering than photography (I'd take that standpoint on most advertising product shots, even though there are probably lots of photography purists who'll hate that fact).

Another ad going for a look of class. It has a very nice archetypal image of "Italy" in black and white. The product (I think it was wine, I wasn't really looking at it) is in colour, so it attracts the eye's attention over the black and white image (as does the red word Riccadonna). I've never been to Italy, but I assume it consists mainly of dark haired supermodels who ride around on Vespa scooters, and aimlessly wander around expensive looking villas in a romantic, slow-motion haze. I guess ads like this are for people like me. The wine must be good, because it comes from an Italian stereotype - and Italians like wine, right?

..and the wet splash around the wine bottles makes it look cool and refreshing.

Bikkie Boxes

Here are my biscuit boxes:

...and here's a rabbit animation.

Biscuit Boxes

I went out to buy some various biscuit boxes to see what it was like on store shelves. Surprisingly (or not) most boxes were a "box" shape, ie: square or rectangular. The only non-box shape I found was a mild rhombus type thing ("Arnott's TeeVee snacks"), which looked a bit tacky so I didn't think it would be a great template for the supposedly classy "Tukka" biscuits.

Granted - I mainly just went to supermarkets. There might be some hip alternative biscuit store somewhere, where hipsters buy their biscuits in all sorts of interesting shaped boxes. I figured I may as well stick to the classic box shape.

So I bought a few variants of the "box" shape, ate the biscuits and then looked at the boxes:


This was the box for "Arnott's Premier Choc Chip Cookies - Australia's Best Tasting". The box has the chocolate colour covered, so we know what flavour we're in for. Plus it has a smooth scripted font and a creamy colour behind the photo which all adds to this sense of the chocolate experience.

The back of the box was also creamy and had more scripted text talking about how great these biscuits are. The box itself was quite big on the market shelf, which implies that there would be lots of biscuits inside (there were less than I thought).

This shortbread box I bought because it was a longer thinner box. That was pretty much the only reason. It has a cheap look (but it was still pretty expensive). There are about five hundred different fonts competing for attention on the front, which doesn't really work well for the design. It also has just a plain colour gradient with a rather unappealing green tartan stripe across it. I think the problem is that it was trying to look simultaneously Australian and Scottish.

On the plus side the shortbread did taste pretty good (except there was only about 5 pieces in there - I mean, you'd have to buy two boxes just to take the photo on the box's cover).

This cracker box seemed like a good choice to me. It had a slightly more classy look to it, mainly due to its use of black. Even though it also has a lot of different fonts on the front, they aren't all competing, like on the shortbread. The gold and yellow coloured stripes are also more subtle. I also like the fact that a smaller box like this has more "I'll just grab those off the shelf on my way to the carrots" supermarket appeal than a big ol' box like the choc chip.