So my wife and I celebrated our five-year anniversary last night just as you might expect – by watching TV through half-closed eyes minutes after putting the twins down for the evening. Having burned through all of our DVR’ed shows, we were forced to watch television in real time. Suddenly, it was 2004 all over again. Only without the bitter presidential”¦oh, never mind.
Then, as we watched a truly odd ballet-teaching couple search for a vacation home in Aruba on “House Hunters International,” the following word from a sponsor appeared to confuse our eyeballs:
Yes, you saw that correctly. The Corn Refiners Association (or CRAss for the acronym lovers out there) is touting the joy of everyone’s favorite delivered-by-rail-tanker sweetener, high fructose corn syrup. Or rather, they’re not so much touting the joy of it as pointing out the fact that everyone thinks it’s hideous but doesn’t know why.
This is flippin’ brilliant.
They don’t claim that HFCS, as the nerds at the FDA call it, is good for you. Because it’s not. They merely point out that it’s no worse for you than regular table sugar. Which, as we all know from old Sugar Smacks ads, is part of a nutritious breakfast. Assuming your breakfast also consists of enough bran muffins to scrape clean all 25 feet of your intestinal tract.
I’m not entirely sure why CRAss felt it necessary to run this campaign. Were people really avoiding products with HFCS so much that they were feeling the pinch? Was government-subsidized ethanol production not paying off as well as they’d hoped? (And just for the record, my wife grew up on a farm in Iowa, so I’m very pro-corn.) I mean, if you’ve already made the decision to eat something artery clogging, are you going to be that picky about the ingredients? I shudder at the thought of what an organic Ho-Ho might taste like. I’m going to go with “otter bladders.”
Still, I dig the strategy. I don’t dig the executions. Much to shill-tastic. Not enough cowbell, proverbial or otherwise. But they did serve their purpose in driving me to SweetSurpise.com. So who’s laughing now?
Twinkie the Kid, that’s who.
Later,
Fox
Then, as we watched a truly odd ballet-teaching couple search for a vacation home in Aruba on “House Hunters International,” the following word from a sponsor appeared to confuse our eyeballs:
Yes, you saw that correctly. The Corn Refiners Association (or CRAss for the acronym lovers out there) is touting the joy of everyone’s favorite delivered-by-rail-tanker sweetener, high fructose corn syrup. Or rather, they’re not so much touting the joy of it as pointing out the fact that everyone thinks it’s hideous but doesn’t know why.
This is flippin’ brilliant.
They don’t claim that HFCS, as the nerds at the FDA call it, is good for you. Because it’s not. They merely point out that it’s no worse for you than regular table sugar. Which, as we all know from old Sugar Smacks ads, is part of a nutritious breakfast. Assuming your breakfast also consists of enough bran muffins to scrape clean all 25 feet of your intestinal tract.
I’m not entirely sure why CRAss felt it necessary to run this campaign. Were people really avoiding products with HFCS so much that they were feeling the pinch? Was government-subsidized ethanol production not paying off as well as they’d hoped? (And just for the record, my wife grew up on a farm in Iowa, so I’m very pro-corn.) I mean, if you’ve already made the decision to eat something artery clogging, are you going to be that picky about the ingredients? I shudder at the thought of what an organic Ho-Ho might taste like. I’m going to go with “otter bladders.”
Still, I dig the strategy. I don’t dig the executions. Much to shill-tastic. Not enough cowbell, proverbial or otherwise. But they did serve their purpose in driving me to SweetSurpise.com. So who’s laughing now?
Twinkie the Kid, that’s who.
Later,
Fox