Roland McDonald at Burger King

by Loredana Barbu 

For the fist assignment, I have chosen one video from YouTube - “Roland McDonald at Burger King” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GpUhULRIuA&feature=fvwrel).

            In my point of view, this message comes from the McDonald’s competitors, Burger King, because there is a fight between this two fast food companies. The Burger King’s company also created and paid for this commercial.

The aim of this video is to position BK’s company as the best in the world, even better than McDonald. They use Roland McDonald to impress the great amount of people, but especially kids, because children think Roland is real and all that he do is important and really good for their life. They use the image of McDonald to emphasize some particular thing, like their food and their services. Moreover, they use some text to highlight the recurrent action that happened – Roland making the visit every day and he is used to buy the same sandwiches. They stress the fact that even Roland is the “face” of McDonald, he prefers the BK’s product instead of  “his own” food.

The “tools of persuasion” used in this video are: the man dressed in Roland and the tips on why chose Burger King over McDonald. The whole commercial is based on comparison, Burger King versus McDonald. To convince the audience why to chose the one over the other, the filmmakers use subtext to transmit they message “choose Burger King over McDonald”. Without any further explanations, the video stresses that at Burge King prices are better and there is more meat in sandwiches.

The message that is not being told is to stop thinking of going to McDonald’s and start doing what even the image of this fast food restaurant is doing.