Food advertising is best when it serves up a healthy dish of appetite appeal. What does this mean? It means the ad ought to make a hungry person want to drop what they’re doing and eat. This ad for Wendy’s new Hot & Crispy Fries is a good example of the appetite appeal approach at work.
In this ad, Wendy’s also directly challenges the top fries dog—McDonald’s—in a fried-potato-to-fried-potato contest. As someone who believes that McD’s ‘owns’ the fast-food french fries space, I’m not apt to believe this pitch from Wendy’s.
But the pitch is good, and I believe I will now have to drive through and munch for myself. I particularly like the sound effects and nod to the horror genre. When the punch line is delivered, the voice-over actor screams. We are free to imagine that the howl is being made by a disgruntled McDonald’s franchise owner.
