In the space of eight days, peanut butter, fresh cantaloupe, baby food, chicken strips and now mushrooms have all been recalled because of suspected or actual contamination. A call to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was unreturned. BJ's Wholesale Club announced a voluntary recall of its prepackaged, private-label brand "Wellsley Farms" mushrooms yesterday after testing turned up possible trace amounts of E. coli bacteria. In a news release, the company said it had received no reports of illness, and recalled them as a precaution. On Monday, Kraft Foods recalled its Oscar Mayer grilled chicken breast strips after it was found to contain Listeria monocytogenes, which can cause listeriosis, a rare but serious infection. There have been no reported cases of illness linked to the chicken. Kraft is advising consumers via a news release to return products with a "Best When Used By" date of April 19 for full refund. Last Friday, Dole recalled cantaloupes that had been imported from Costa Rica, found to contain life-threatening salmonella. No illness was reported. Also on Friday, Hain recalled jars of Earth's Best Organic 2 Apple Peach Barley Wholesome Breakfast baby food because they may be contaminated with Clostridium botulinum, which can cause botulism, a life-threatening illness. No contamination or illness has been reported. On Wednesday of last week, ConAgra recalled Peter Pan peanut butter as well as Wal-Mart's Great Value peanut butter after 300 people in 39 states were sickened by salmonella. Sean McBride, vp/communications for the Grocery Manufacturers/Food Producers Association, says the government and the food industry is working hard to ensure the safety of the food supply in the United States. "People need to have confidence in the foods they eat and the brands they buy," he says. "What you don't see in the headlines are the many, many, many incidences that never happen. "The food industry across the board, from field to fork, has food safety as its number one priority. Without safe food, nothing else we do is possible." Relatedly, the USDA announced earlier this week that it was implementing the first changes to its meat and poultry plant inspections program in a decade. Plants with a history of problems will receive greater scrutiny, and conversely, processing plants that have better records of meat and poultry handling will see fewer inspections for contamination from E. coli, salmonella and other germs. The new "risk-based" system will evaluate the type of product produced and the plant's record of food and safety violations. According to the Centers for Disease Control, there are an estimated 76 million cases of food-borne illness each year in the United States, the vast majority of which are mild and cause symptoms that last a day or two. Some cases are more serious, leading to 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually. The most severe cases tend to occur in the very old, the very young, and those with weakened immune systems.
To build awareness for its contact-free payment method and increase consumer acceptance, the first commercial promoting MasterCard Worldwide's PayPass will air during Sunday's broadcast of the 79th Annual Academy Awards. In addition to the commercial, MasterCard will post five tongue-in-cheek vignettes tomorrow exclusively on Priceless.com. The online-only spots, which feature various celebrities tapping on the go, seek to entice consumers to the site to learn more about how PayPass works and to get a card. The 60-second spot, titled "Ella Phant" for its starring elephant, was directed by Jim Sheridan, who has two other ads in MasterCard's long-running "Priceless" series to his credit. The new spot shows the ease and safety of using the contact-free payment method when an elephant leaves her ailing zookeeper and heads into the city with her PayPass and quickly and easily buys tissues, medicine, soup and a blanket. PayPass is intended for environments where speed is essential, such as fast feeders, convenience stores, sports complexes, vending machines and parking lots. MasterCard developed the technology, and now licenses it to both Visa and American Express. MasterCard reports more than 13 million PayPass cards or devices are in the marketplace, where they are accepted at 46,000 merchant locations worldwide, including at 7-Eleven, McDonald's and CVS. Among the stars featured in supporting vignettes at Priceless.com are movie critic Gene Shalit buying movie tickets and popcorn, competitive eaters Takeru Kobayashi and Sonya Thomas buying hot dogs in a convenience store, comedian David Cross hailing a cab while moving to his new apartment one block down the street, and pro football player Vinny Testaverde buying refreshments at a stadium during a football game. About a quarter of all American homes are expected to tune in to Oscar-fest, which this year features ads from other financial services companies--including American Express, whose spokesperson, daytime TV talk show host Ellen DeGeneres, is also the emcee of this year's Academy Awards. Bank of America has said it will bow its first commercial sporting a new tagline to replace the four-year-old "Higher Standards." Ratings for the Academy Awards, while strong, have declined the last four years. Household ratings in 2004 reached 26.0 then dropped to 25.4 in 2005 and to 23.1 last year. "MasterCard is thrilled to be launching a host of creative to coincide with one of the most anticipated television events of the year," said Amy Fuller, group executive, Americas Marketing for MasterCard Worldwide. "It will be an engaging experience for consumers to see a fantastic and compelling 60-second TV spot and then be able to log onto Priceless.com to view five others starring some familiar personalities, all in situations that warrant the use of PayPass."
Hitching its wagon to Hollywood stars, Coca-Cola will launch three of four new Diet Coke commercials during the Academy Awards on Sunday that show how people feel about the product and carry a new slogan, "Yours, Diet Coke." The new ads depict scenarios that reinforce how Diet Coke is there for people who love the brand, the company said in a news release yesterday. Set to the Irving Berlin tune "What'll I Do," "Empty" shows the range of emotions people feel when they realize they are out of Diet Coke. In "Backlot," a temperamental actress won't leave her trailer to play the big scene without her favorite soft drink. And in "Frames," a woman searching for a Diet Coke takes a unique journey as she wanders through a series of photographs of special moments from her life that are arranged on her mantel. Katie Bayne, senior vice president, Coca-Cola Brands, Coca-Cola North America, says via the release: "Diet Coke has always been a brand that epitomizes adult style. The Academy Awards are the height of stylish sophistication, so the Oscars telecast is the perfect place to debut the new campaign." But not everyone is blinded by the paparazzi. Gerry Khermouch, executive editor of Beverage Marketer's Insights, says of the effort: "Since every consumer well knows the product 'benefit,' Coke is clearly trying just to romance the brand a little, giving it a greater edge of sophistication at a time that some consumers may be moving away from the humdrum brands in their lives." The new ads are part of an integrated marketing campaign for Diet Coke. The company is offering movie fans the chance to "Walk the Red Carpet" next year through a My Coke Rewards sweepstakes. Winners will receive seating in the Red Carpet bleacher seats outside the Kodak Theater and enjoy an exclusive Red Carpet tour sometime prior to the Oscars telecast in 2008. The marketing campaign also features digital and print presence as well as regional retail activation. Ads are running in publications such as People, Entertainment Weekly, Vanity Fair, and Gourmet. The March issue of Premiere features a tear-out Oscars "ballot" and viewing guide to follow the broadcast. According to Nielsen Monitor-Plus, Coca-Cola spent $88 million on Diet Coke advertising from January to November 2006. A new ad for My Coke Rewards will run during "Road to the Oscars," which airs immediately prior to the Academy Awards on ABC. The spot shows a husband surprising his wife for their anniversary with ... a Coke bottle cap? The wife is a bit skeptical until she realizes the cap could win her plane tickets to Hawaii. Entitled "Howard Finklestein," the ad is one of several in a new campaign for My Coke Rewards that use a fun tone to remind people that with My Coke Rewards "every cap is something." Both the "Yours, Diet Coke" campaign and the My Coke Rewards advertising were created by agency Wieden+Kennedy of Portland, Ore.
Think of them as $2.6 million lemmings: Super Bowl ads that leaped to their death one after another. First, General Motor's suicidal robot. Next, Snickers' manly kiss. Next, Volkswagen yanked its "Jumpers"--not a Super Bowl ad, but in terms of timing, close enough. It's no secret that there's a method to this madness, and that by pushing the envelope, marketers hope to create controversial ads that will take on a cross-platform life of their own. If the ads migrate into the viral world--cropping up on YouTube, Yahoo and in blogs--it not only justifies the investment in TV time, it reaches key buyers who wouldn't be caught dead watching regular TV. "Increasingly, companies realize that to get noticed, they need to push the boundaries in ways that their core audiences won't find offensive, and that their peripheral audience might," says Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. "Companies are trying to find ads that create buzz across platforms. To do that, they create a sense of community around this in joke, and this potentially schismatic issue." "In order to create an ad with that kind of afterlife, the bar for entertainment value has been raised," adds Jamie Tedford, senior vice president of media and marketing innovation with Arnold Worldwide in Boston, "and it's forcing agencies to take some risks. We know what works in terms of getting something to move around You Tube-we know there are Golden Rules to virality. Humor is important, so is controversy and maybe even a little shock value." In other words, to go viral, it helps to have an ad that's entertaining and offensive." If marketers play it right, they can bond with customers in two ways: First, consumers get to laugh. Secondly, they get to feel morally superior to the uptight advocacy groups that object. On blogs that post these ads, there are pages of posts like: "No one has a sense of humor any more" or "Americans just can't take a joke." And in a peculiar way, Turow points out, such ads even create a marketing opportunity for the lampooned. Whether it advocates for suicide victims or gay-rights activists, "the uproar that surrounds these ads offers the advocacy groups a chance to get their point across, too," he says. What is a secret, though, is what makes an ad edgy enough to go viral, says Stefan Tornquist, research director for MarketingSherpa, a Rhode Island-based research company. "There just aren't very many ads that are that compelling. People aren't going online to see a Budweiser or Snickers ad because they enjoyed it so much that they want to see it again--they're going to see it for the first time, just to see what all the fuss is about." So far this year, there's no arguing that suicide was the joke du jour. In addition to the GM and VW spots, Washington Mutual has an ad with bankers out on a ledge, and CareerBuilder.com shows a pack of crazed workers jumping off a cliff en masse. Media pundits quickly weighed in, as well they should have. It's easy to recall the good old days when no one complained that the theme song for 1970's "M*A*S*H was "Suicide Is Painless" or that Bill Murray found so many clever ways to off himself in 1993's "Groundhog Day." But given what mental-health researchers now know about teen suicide and contagion in the post-Kurt Cobain era, it's probably not a bad idea for creatives to swear off suicide jokes for a while. But what might spark a controversy changes fast, says Tornquist. Janet Jackson's nipple prompted a huge reaction, he points out. But even though poor Prince pranced around with a shadow phallus, it barely got a few wisecracks on the next day's talk shows. So what's the next envelope-pushing topic marketers will try to exploit? Tornquist's money is on religion, either Christianity or Islam. "In this country right now, it doesn't get any edgier than that." But that won't work for many mainstream marketers, says Tedford, who points out that sooner or later, companies will tire of the run-an-ad/yank-an-ad strategy and insist that creatives spend more time with the crisis-management team before launching a potentially divisive ad. "We don't have to go looking for the next taboo," he says. "There's plenty of fodder in the realm of being entertaining without being offensive."
Weight Watchers, a diet program that has almost exclusively appealed to females since its inception in the 1960s, will target men with a new online diet program it plans to launch in April. Apparently inspired by NutriSystem--which saw its male membership rise from 13% before Miami Dolphin Dan Marino joined as spokesperson to 30% today--Weight Watchers is hoping to increase its male membership, which stands at 10% in the offline/weekly meeting program and 8% online. Hawked by Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson for the past decade, the upcoming WeightWatchers.com effort is a first attempt to get a bigger share of the male demographic by specifically catering to their dieting needs. At the same time, several analysts expect Weight Watchers to up its ad spend this year, breaking a first offline campaign for its online WeightWatchers.com this year as well as new national campaign for the offline program. The account, valued at $70 million, had been at Young & Rubicam and is now under review. The April effort is the first in the industry tailored to men. However, NutriSystem sells dieters its own food products, which would seemingly have greater appeal to men. Yet, the elimination of face-to-face meetings by Weight Watchers probably is attractive to males, who aren't as comfortable in groups, generally. Separately, Jenny McCarthy, an outspoken, sassy actress in the mold of Jenny Craig's Kirstie Alley, has recently teamed with Weight Watchers.