Potato, Potato

Well this is a little awkward, the last blog post I wrote was titled “Final Blog Post,” I guess I can chalk this one up to the fact that I was already registered for a different writing class and only recently switched into this one. I think I’ll live and according to Sullivan, once I’m really through with this blog no one is really going to read it again. Either way I’m back to blogging, and am pretty excited about it. The previous topics I wrote about were the news, and not to say the news doesn’t excite me all that much, but the news doesn’t excite me all that much. There are topics that are interesting but I find that food unlike the news is something you can talk to anyone about because there is little to no prior knowledge needed.

This relates to the article we just read about how different advertisers use different levels of language to attract different social classes to buy their chips. When I made the statement that anyone can talk about food I wasn’t challenging the hypothesis we just read about, but rather stating the obvious that everyone can really talk about food because everyone has undoubtedly had a potato chip in their life. It would be funny to see a politician trying to talk to a bum about a bag of Terra’s Yukon Gold chips and see the bum have no idea what he was talking about because he only knows lays because it has fewer words on the bag.

In this article they connect the language levels on the bags to different levels of society being able to read them. And then because they can read them, they are more appealing whereas if they cared about saving money they might go with the chip that costs them roughly 20 cents less per ounce. I found the health aspect they explored most interesting because all of the chips they did research on contained no trans fat. But when they looked at the bags only two of the inexpensive brands of chips advertised there was no trans fat compared to all of the expensive chips advertising that there was none.

I’d expect to see the same kinds of advertising with fast food chains. It already shows with their burger ads that have been going on for the last few years mainly between McDonalds, Burger King, and Wendy’s. Whether the ad is saying “I’m lovin’ it” to pretend as if anyone actually enjoys a Big Mac or saying “Fresh Never Frozen Beef” to try to make you believe that burger isn’t heated up in the back of the place you're ordering it from the ads are all trying to appeal to different people. The only major difference from the burger and chip ads are that the burger ads mainly use TV and images instead of text, but in the end you're still getting the same crappy burger, there’s actually a difference in between potato chips.