Arby's Advertisement Analysis: What Makes You Hungry

Matt Scherrer

Advertising Analysis draft 2

English 101 Fall 2016

9/23/16

I can tell you from experience that hunting makes you hungry. Very hungry! I attribute this hunger to two things. The first is that hunting usually requires a lot of walking, sometimes more than 10 miles a day, while carrying a gun that gets heavier as the day goes on, or you may have to drag a heavy animal a long way. The second is that you are spending all day thinking about the meat that you are going for, and what you will do with it, so you get kind of hungry thinking about it. This is where the Arby’s advertisement comes into play. The Arby’s ad brings a hunter’s hunger down to his basic desire for meat, and preys on his natural instincts. The advertisement uses simple techniques to grab the attention of its audience. The ad is a close up picture of a rusty old orange sign on an old fence post. The orang sign has

The advertisement says, “THE ONLY THING THAT SHOULD GET BETWEEN A HUNTER AND HIS MEAT IS BREAD.” This is written in a font like what you would commonly find on signs that mark public hunting land, which makes it recognizable to just about any hunter. All of the text, with the exception of the Arby’s logo, is capitalized, which is how text usually appears on these signs. Most of the text is relatively small, but there are some words that stand out that really grab your attention. These words are A HUNTER and MEAT, which makes sense in this ad because all hunters like meat. It is almost like this ad is screaming these words at you, which helps to pound these words into your head and influence your decision on what you will eat. This is true whether we admit we are influenced by the ad or not because, as Kilbourne says in his essay, “In spite of the fact that we are surrounded by more advertising than ever before. Most of us still ridicule the idea that we might be personally influenced by it.”