The Miracle Food TV Spots
February 3rd, 2010
Design:
Client: themiraclefood.ca
Date: 2009
At the risk of fueling one of the most negative threads on the CDR, I can’t resist posting this ad (apologies for the poor quality, this is the only version available for our use* – click here to see others): A screen shot from themiraclefood.ca was posted here a few weeks ago with no further explanation from us. At first, there was no response, but a few days later the comments started. Since then it’s been a steady stream of people who seem genuinely offended by these commercials – so offended that just a screen shot of the web page is an opportunity to vent.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I find it hard to believe that people are that upset by these commercials. Aside from the pleasantly acerbic tone, there’s nothing particularly edgy or controversial here. Still, the comments seem to be authentic (each comes from a unique author at a unique IP address). It’s always difficult to completely rule out trolls and this could be part of a well orchestrated guerrilla marketing initiative, though that seems a little out of character for this campaign. As Jess Sloss pointed out on Social Squared, the miracle food website and campaign as a whole (or lack thereof) seems to be missing a lot of the marketing components we’ve come to expect from this type of campaign – *no official youtube uploads, no social media component and no ownership. Video blogger John Doody goes one step further, suggesting that the campaign is so badly done that it must be intentional – an elaborate fake/marketing test. Not sure that this is the story either, but there’s definitely something going on. Anyone know who’s behind this campaign?
-Michael Erdmann
Entry Filed under: Advertising,Brand,Film and Video
5 Comments Add your own
1. Justin | February 3rd, 2010 at 10:49
No idea who is behind the campaign, or why some people are (allegedly) so offended. It’s humorous, but in the same way that B movies are so bad that some people love them.
2. Brocoly Eeeter | February 3rd, 2010 at 12:26
This is clearly a subliminal campaign to bring communism to Canada via our love of broccoli. As a founding member of the family council on not minding my own business (FCNMMOB, or “the mob” for short), I am going to submit a million form letters to the CRTC to have the ads pulled, and there is nothing you can do to stop me.
3. John Ryan | February 5th, 2010 at 15:58
Of note is the fact that themiraclefood.ca is entirely image based, including all text and navigation. This type of image based website is highly un-search-engine-friendly and generally avoided when building a site for a campaign that you hope people will come upon organically. However, Speaking from personal experience gained while working on a highly targeted pilot project for a large corporation, it’s not uncommon for companies to use a combination of ROBOTS.txt (a file which tells search engines what to search and index) and image substitutions for text to prevent a site from showing up in general search results.
In spite of the non SEO nature of an image based website, there are a number of META keywords (words which search engines know are specifically used to describe a site’s content) hard-coded into the headers of each page which directly reference the television campaigns. The site also has a Google Analytics tracking code, which means whoever is behind it knows who’s coming to the site and where they’re coming from.
All of this leads me to believe that the agency/organization behind the television commercials only wants people to come to the site by making the effort to look up the commercials themselves (as opposed to coming across the site after looking up the health benefits of broccoli — which you’d think they would want). This does give some credence to the argument that this is a highly targeted campaign with some as-yet-undiscovered (by us, at least) motives.
That or this really is all about broccoli and we’re just playing into the creative agency behind the campaign’s goal to get us talking about a vegetable. I, for one, know I’ve never before expended quite so much effort on broccoli.
4. Sid | February 16th, 2010 at 18:01
Wow, just went and read the earlier thread and those are some serious broc-haters. I find the commercial bizarre but it certainly doesn’t warrant that much rage. Not like a pro-brussel sprout ad. Now that would be something to get angry about.
5. Laura W | August 23rd, 2010 at 16:53
People actually care that much? I agree, I think the admakers just wanted to get people who do care that much talking. Yay broccoli, oh miracle food of the golden realm!
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed