• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, March 13, 2014

Run, don’t walk with your nearest smartphone browser to FoodPornIndex.com.  

We’ll wait.

Don’t be afraid to play with your food. That is part of the point of the site, and it is one of the reasons that the adaptive media project works best on a touchscreen.

Don’t miss my favorite, Melon Meditation, even though most of you will not be able to resist the somewhat less inspired and obvious Bacon Shake. The Donut Zoom is fun, as is the Brussel Ballet. For wags with a real porn bent, the Berry Pop exercise takes a few seconds to get the joke. If you lived through the 60s or 70s, the Mushroom Zoom will have special resonance.

This is another inspired interactive project from Bolthouse Farms, the baby carrot harvester and health juice brand that has made a name for itself of late by leveraging digital creatively to even the playing field with better funded megacorp competitors. The company was with us at OMMA at SXSW delineating its deft use of Instagram to deliver coupons to customers who took pics of the bottle. On Vine the company is doing six-second juice recipes.

The PornFoodIndex is a brilliant riff off of the Instagram and Pinterest phenomenon of people sharing images of their food. The company is analyzing hashtags related to food on Instagram and Twitter to enumerate the good food vs. bad food breakdown. To no one’s surprise, the junk food party is walking away with the competition at about 70% of over 200 million social media references thus far. But therein the fun begins. Bolthouse puts each veggie and donut into its own tappable tchotchke.

Again, don’t miss the Melon Meditation.

This is a disarmingly soft sell overall, even for a brand play. Bolthouse itself is barely to be seen here, although it pops in whenever there is deeper messaging about the aim of the project, details etc. The individual modules don’t lead to juice recipes or specific products containing the dancing, singing veggie. They are restrained almost to a fault. Since getting the underdog brand some name recognition, one wonders if the products couldn’t have been woven into the experience a little more obviously without diminishing the creativity.

Bolthouse is in that enviable stage where it is letting loose the powers of its marketing creative to make a splash. Marketer from the company Pamela Naumes told the SXSW crowd at our event last week that their executive gave them free reign over the couponing program via Instagram. The promo had a deep discount with no limits and no inkling at the start that it would harvest a 91% coupon print out rate from the people who uploaded a bottle image. The company just wanted to get bottles into the hands of customers.

And there is something to be said for a aligning a brand with creativity itself. So far the company has leveraged the category’s most attractive but abstract elements -- lush, literally delicious color, hi-res images of product and vegetables themselves that seem to pop off the screen waiting to be eaten… or played with.

The biggest downside to such a high concept strategy is fan expectations of what comes next.