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Hey, meat lovers!
Got your attention? What? You’re offended? Just because I implied you’re
insatiable sexual predators, or possibly that you’re rapacious carnivores
and little better than dumb beasts? Sorry. Let’s try this again . . .
Hey, pocket lovers!
(That’s better. It makes no sense, but it’s not as offensive.) Both means of
getting your attention come from recent TV spots for McCain Foods.
So, carnivorous
pocket-lovers, what’s wrong with this phrase: “The taste to set you on your
jets”? Yeah, whenever I think about a dough pouch full of pulped pizza
topping, I yearn to perch on a jet; Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas, General
Dynamics — it doesn’t matter. I can’t always get to an airport, though, so
sometimes I think about sitting on a gas stove. Either way, one bite and I’m
set on jets of some kind.
Want a chaser for
that McCain Pizza Pocket? Their iced tea, supposedly, “refreshes down to a
T.” No, I can’t explain what the preposition “down to” is doing in that
sentence. How about some of this fruit-flavored beverage concentrate? This
is what figure skater Elvis Stojko drinks when he, uh, “goes for the big
one,” whatever that means.
What point am I
missing? Why do all these slogans sound as though they were translated from
another language by a copywriter with no grasp of idiomatic English? Is the
bad writing part of a deliberate annoyance factor, meant to drill the
product into our collective subconscious by setting our teeth on edge?
There’s nothing hip
about pre-Revolutionary France,
which ought to make things easier, but McCain fumbles that, too: “When Marie
Antoinette said, ‘Let them eat cake,’ did she mean McCain Deep ’N’ Delicious
freezable dessert extrusion?”
No.
She said that when
told the people of France
were starving and crying for bread. The French people were so grateful for
Ms. Antoinette’s dietary advice that they guillotined her. How does this
make us want to eat chilly chocolate sludge? The spot raises other
questions: the likelihood of any kind of refrigeration in late 18th-century France,
for one. Maybe this the first in a series of commercials for McCain Deep ’N’
Delicious desserts featuring callous, irresponsible rulers. Next up, Baby
Doc Duvalier fleeing Port-au-Prince with a frozen chocolate pie. After that,
Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos scarfing slabs of Deep ‘N’ Etcetera while
scrambling to Hawaii: “When things got hot in the Philippines, did the
dessert stay cool . . . and deep, and delicious?”
There are a couple
of possible explanations for the cheap lameness pervading every McCain
commercial. The client’s decision is the only one that counts; maybe their
agency wizards have trotted innumerable chunks of advertising greatness
before McCain’s arbiters, only to have each one shot down because it wasn’t
sufficiently ham-handed. “Sorry, people. If it isn’t as subtle as a flying
mallet, we don’t think it’ll work.”
McCain is poised
tantalizingly on the verge of a weird kind of greatness, though. Think, for
a moment, of the momentous Mentos. The Van Melle company’s mints are
diamond-hard on the outside, gooey in a deeply unsettling way on the inside,
and barely edible. Yet the relentlessly dorky “Freshmaker” campaign doubled
North American sales of the candies between 1991 and 1994.
Like the McCain
efforts, the spots were lame, cheap and clumsy. But those inexcusable Mentos
ads generated their own profound cachet. They were so bad, consumers fixated
on them, making them the nonpareil of groovitude. Want proof of Mentos’
hipster bona fides? Page 125 of Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs: “We all
made fun of the commercial for Mentos mints, saying ‘Mentos’ all night in a
goofy European accent. ‘Mentos.’ It’s so dumb.” This year, the Foo Fighters
— ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl’s band — did a video for their single “Big
Me” that mashed the entire “Freshmaker” campaign into one slavish,
shot-for-shot homage. Brand awareness and street cred like that are rare and
precious things.
McCain, too, could
be reaping such enviable “mind share.” A little tweakage is all that’s
required; not more creativity — less. Don’t aim to be hip — work
aggressively not to be. Bring back the stiff pitchman in a gray suit in
front of a poorly lit cyclorama, intoning some plodding, somber copy
extolling the nutritional benefits and convenience of McCain comestibles. Or
dig up some 15-year-old spots and run them exactly as they first aired.
Don’t fix the fractured grammar in meaningless, baffling slogans like “set
you on your jets,” or “down to a T.” Instead, make it just a little bit “wronger.”
Translate the slogans into Japanese, Turkish, Urdu, and Serbo-Croatian
successively, then back into English: “Pizza Pocket consumption will be most
assuredly pinioning your family firmly atop your propulsion unit with
abundant joy and happy luck, pretty bicycle.”
If that doesn’t
make McCain’s the hippest brand in history, I’ll eat a Pizza Pocket. |
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