Food and eating Archives - Otis Regrets... or not

DMA &Then 2016… I’ll be back

I’ve been asked to repeat my Ignition session at this year’s annual Direct Marketing Association conference, which will take place in Los Angeles. My slot is Monday October 17, 4:00-4:45 PM.

Titled (for legacy reasons too complex to go into here) “Devilish Details: Looking for an Advantage in Your Copy and Design”, it’s essentially an opportunity for creative practitioners and managers to let down their hair in a town hall setting. You know all those times you’ve seen a really good or bad example of creative and wished you could talk to somebody about it? Or that ridiculous assignment that you aced in spite of the suits? Or how your legal department maimed your dream concept? Here’s your chance to share.

I’ll come prepared with a few examples to prime the pump, and would love your suggestions either as comments or emails to me. Some of the areas I want to touch on are “Brands saying bae” (cringeworthy examples of corporations trying to be hip in social media, as featured by the @BrandsSayingBae handle or seen in the wild), infographic abuse (some are ok, but some are graphics for the sake of graphics, right?), mumblecore emails and whether they work, and fake-official direct mail that makes you wonder how stupid marketers think we really are.

Got any more ideas? Please share!

We will also have food! Not in the session (though copies of my book will be given away), but repeatedly during the conference because Los Angeles is a great food town. I’m specifically interested in great Chinese in the San Gabriel Valley and interior Mexican and am starting the research process now. Again, suggestions appreciated. This will be fun!

“Hope you are well” email intro makes me sick

Here’s an email typical of many I receive these days. It’s to a business account, and it begins:

Otis,

I hope all is well. I’m not sure if you’re attending the Fancy Food Show in NYC on June 29th – the July 1st, but if you are I thought you would be interested in visiting the Crown Maple booth…

Why do so many marketers these days think it is appropriate, and maybe disarming, to inquire about the recipient’s health as a way to start a mass email? What’s it to them? What business is of theirs? If I’m well I’ll attend the event, unless I get run over on the way, and if I’m not I don’t need you reminding me of it.

Note the odd use of “the” above, before “July 1st”, which suggests the writer is not a native speaker. Could this have something to do with it? The French (this is for a maple syrup product, so I suspect un Habitant at work) have the equivalent phrase Comment ça va but that just means “how’s it going?” which I don’t find at all offensive.

I’m preparing a longer post on the general trend toward faux-casual business email but this stuck in my craw so I couldn’t wait to get it out. There. Now I feel better. Thanks for asking.

FSI coupons score for the home team before 2014 Super Bowl

Super Bowl FSIs — Football-themed FSIs a week before the big bsme

Okay, football fans, what’s special about this past Sunday? If you said Pro Bowl, you just got sacked for a loss. Correct answer: it’s the weekend before the Super Bowl, and therefore the Sunday when the FSI coupons do a Richard Sherman trying to connect themselves to the Super Bowl without actually mentioning the name of the event, since they haven’t paid the hefty licensing fee.

Here comes Kraft with “your bold lineup for game day dipping”. Foster Farms wants us to “save big on tasty favorites for game day”. With a casserole made with Carnation evaporated milk, “game day just got tastier”. Attacking a problem we didn’t know we had, Hefty plasticized paper plates advise us to “soak proof your game day”. And, in case you’re planning to eat a few too many nachos, Pepcid offers to “kick off the big game with even bigger savings”. Cheez-It advises you to “kick off the big game with these fan favorites”. And Land O’Frost offers “easy game day entertaining with our premium line-up”. Anybody notice a trend here?

But the story on the sidelines is that there are far fewer of these themed coupons than in years past. And, where many of them did photo shoots of hyperactive fans enjoying their products in a home setting, now most simply stick some stock art of a green football field behind their usual overdressed product graphics. What’s the strategy, coach? Where’s your jumbo package or that gimmick play?

It just may be that marketers have found these themed ads aren’t worth the effort in terms of incremental sales. The overwhelming majority of coupon clippers are female, and so the underlying message is that the little woman is going to put out a bountiful spread for the men in her house and their loutish guests. But more and more consumers may be blowing the whistle on this blatant pandering. It may be that it’s better to promote your tried-and-true product positioning after all.

In my house, I know, the males are going to be expected to put together their own Super Bowl spread and clean up after themselves. Maybe I should get some of those soak-proof plates.

How to get more page views for your copywriting blog

Would you like to increase the traffic on your marketing blog or copywriting web site through organic search results? Here is an accidental success story that may help.

I have another blog, Burnt My Fingers, which is specifically about food and cooking. It’s a fun, niche project and I have never worked too hard to pump up the metrics. But in the last 3 months my page views have increased by well over 100%. How come?

I wrote a post called “Why I’m not buying a Sansaire sous vide device” which was an offshoot of some earlier articles on this specialty cooking method. Well, turns out there is a lot of interest in this gadget and the buzz is only increasing as the holidays roll around. Do a web search for “Sansaire” as many shoppers might and there’s my post, close to the top of your search results. It looks like a negative review (it actually isn’t) so is just the sort of thing a shopper might want to read as part of their research.

The good news is that search links to this specific post account for only about 25% of my new page views. The rest are from the activity of users once they get to the site: they browse around to linked articles, then my recipes, which is exactly what you hope they would do if the article they came for is relevant to your core content vs. link bait.

The key to this accidental success story was finding a topic a certain audience wants to read about, vs something I wanted to write about. Think about the interests of your audience—then think about how you might mine that with catchy content that draws them to your site.

“Zombie Mouth” promo shows, rather than eats, brains

Plants_vs_Zombies_toothbrush_270x269 — *Zombie Mouth!*

Here’s a great promo we can all learn from: The American Dental Association has joined forces with PopCap games to offer a coupon good for a free download of “Plants vs. Zombies” as a Halloween giveaway. Just go to the ZombieMouth landing page and click the link at the top, and you can download a PDF of clip-out coupons that can be redeemed online between October 30 and November 10.

The game is available for PC or Mac, and retails for $19.95 so hopefully kids won’t mind getting the giveaway coupon in their trick-or-treat bags along with their candy. There’s no limit on how many you can print and give away. The quick redemption phase guarantees that it will go viral, and I can see “ew… you’ve got zombie mouth!” as a new meme over at Lake Ave Elementary that will encourage kids to brush their teeth.

This campaign has so many things right. The redemption is seamless. The theme is in lock step with the message that kids should brush more often. And the execution is catchy and memorable. After all the undead examples of badvertising I like to cite, it’s a pleasure to dig up an effort that has some real brains behind it.

Applebee’s out-ironics The Onion with its new campaigns

Have you seen this? According to a media commentator, Applebee’s has a new campaign in which they are urging hipsters to dine at their restaurants “ironically” which makes sense since they are never going to get them there through conventional advertising. Take a look:

Funny thing is, Applebee’s actually is running a social media campaign that is far more bizarre as this, called “Girls’ Night Out. Life is better shared.” A Betty White character harangues ladies for spending too much time online, then tells them the solution is to get down to Applebee’s for some facetime. Take a look:

There’s also a tumblr page that anchors the campaign and has links to Pinterest and Twitter pages (no Facebook, maybe because it’s a regional campaign). All the elements of a well thought out and expensive social media campaign.

Speaking of social media, Applebee’s is also marketing a life size inflatable dummy you can leave at your desk while you sneak out for lunch. This one is on Facebook, where you can take the Desk Lunch Diagnosis Quiz (I am the “Break Room Hero… people are tired of cleaning up the microwave after you”).

Does this stuff work? The “goddess” video above has over 50,000 hits but how many of those are potential customers? There are only 400 plus followers on the Twitter page and the selection of inflatable dolls on Amazon was originally 7 but is now down to just 2. The bottom line is that Applebee’s is still Applebee’s (check the hashtag #applebee and you’ll get a far more realistic snapshot of Middle America’s view of the chain) and there’s only so much you can do to get hipsters to change their behavior… unless they do it ironically, perhaps.

Pork Board asks consumers to pig out with new slogan

If the National Pork Board has its way, conversations like this will soon be happening in homes across America:

He: What’s for dinner?
She: A nice chicken.
He: What’s wrong with pork? You know I love my pork.
She: We’ve already had pork seven times this week. Pork spareribs with hoisin sauce…. pork belly sliders…. crown roast of pork with apples…
He: Be inspired! How about pork sushi?
She: Wait a minute, I forgot. The Smiths are coming for dinner. They don’t eat pork.
He: Religious reasons?
She: No, they just don’t eat pork. And if you don’t eat pork, there’s no way to change that.

A little background: according to the Associated Press on March 4, 2011, the National Pork Board has decided to “move on” after 25 years promoting its product with the highly recognizable slogan, “The Other White Meat”. The new tag lie is… wait for it… “Pork: Be Inspired.” According to Ceci Snyder, the Des Moines, Iowa-based board’s vice president of marketing, “we want to increase pork sales by 10 percent by 2014. To do that, we needed to make a stronger connection, a more emotional connection to our product.”

The AP story goes on to note that pork consumption averaged 50 pounds per person in 2010, compared to 61 pounds for beef and 70 pounds for chicken. However, “research done by the Pork Board shows 28 percent of U.S. households make up nearly 70 percent of the nation’s at-home consumption of fresh pork. The new campaign is aimed at getting existing pork consumers to think more about how they can incorporate it into their meal planning.”

The old campaign is not exactly being retired, however. The old slogan will remain on the Pork Board’s website and on apparel sold by the board, but web searches for “Pork: The Other White Meat” will direct people to the new campaign…

Let’s break down this grisly carcass, shall we?

The Message: Some might say that a slogan that is not actually used, and is instantly forgettable, is not actually a slogan. So let’s move past that.

The Marketing: under what circumstances does a product throw up its hands at trying to get new customers and instead focus on keeping the customers it has and getting them to buy more? The cigarette industry comes to mind, what else? Presumably the pork folks had good research that told them that a/no new pork eaters could be acquired and b/the current audience could be profitably convinced to up their pork consumption, but both assumptions seem very strange to me.

The comparative stats tell me the pork eaters are in fact doing some pretty heavy lifting already, pound for pound enjoying pork at 1 of ever 3 meals compared to the other two protein sources. And in fact pork’s shortfall might be explained entirely by the fact there are no pork fast food stores as there are burger joints and chicken shacks.

But never mind that, if we stipulate that we can only succeed by getting pork eaters to eat more pork, what kind of marketing might do that? Hey, how about… “the other white meat”? We all think of chicken as a versatile ingredient… pure genius to put pork on the same pedestal. And certainly much better than an exhortation that sounds like it might have been the product of a committee planning a high school homecoming dance.

And the funny thing is that the only people who will actually get to see the new slogan are people who do a web search for the old slogan. That’s right, we’ll take that tiny percentage of people who take advertising messages to heart and we’ll toss a bucket of farm waste in their face. Do a search for “The Other White Meat” to see how enjoyable this is.

The Morality: Secretly, I am happy about this fiasco and here’s why. In 1988 when “The Other White Meat” hit our butcher counters, its purpose was to promote the new trend to factory farms which fed pigs lean foods in order to produce a leaner product as compared to the traditional happy pigs rooting in the farmyard. A bonus was that the conditions in these factory farms stressed out the pigs (an animal more intelligent than a dog) so much that their flesh was watered down by stress hormones.

If we have been unsuccessful in convincing people to eat lean meat from tortured pigs, perhaps that is not entirely a bad thing.

On the floor at Fancy Food Show 2011

The Fancy Food Show was jam-packed at San Francisco’s Moscone Center…. good news for business but making it difficult to navigate during a truncated visit this week. Here are some highlights:

Trending up: cured meats, especially Serrano and Parma hams. I remember when it was a rare treat to get a slice of one of these beasts; this year they are everywhere. Though oddly enough, the salt content of most seems significantly reduced from classic preparations. There was also a jerky stand advertising 50% less sodium than traditional jerky. Also, lots of high-end sodas.

Trending down: nuts. Once a massive snack category, the vendors showing fancy smoked and salted nuts are today few and far between, Too much fat for today’s snacker? Baja Bob’s, a low calorie cocktail maker, can pour you a margarita for 60 calories vs 240 calories for a regular margarita. The benefit of which, they explain, is that your date will have more than one.

Down and out: gluten free everything, All of last year’s signs were gone. Also, vendors trumpeting the ‘USDA Organic” certification were rare even though a pavilion was set aside for them. May be that, as some of the folks at Terra Madre Day speculated, the designation is cumbersome and simultaneously lets in questionable products while not defining a level of quality that is actually useful.

Paul Bertolli and his wonderful head cheese

Product of the year: Testa di Porco (head cheese) from Fra’mani. Paul Bertolli has been threatening to bring this product to market for several years and last Sunday it happened. Ethereal. It’s not little bits of this and that like traditional head cheese but nice big chunks of celery-cured ham held together with a clove-y gelee. People were standing in line for this one.

Trend to watch: consolidation. NYC-based Rick’s Picks, to take one example, is now shipping 10 standard products rather than 14 in the past. In a tough economy retailers can’t be asked to stock that many SKU’s. Rick says there’s a demand for “spears” but that yen is now satisfied with a classic dill sour (really crunchy and good) and the green bean and asparagus spears have been put out to pasture.

Most popular giveaway: showgoers who traveled across the country, and could have all the food they wanted, stood in a long line to get a tea press with the Tea Republic logo. Starbucks take note.

What’s cooking at CES 2011?

On the plane heading to CES in Las Vegas, I decided to think about innovations I’d LIKE to see prior to reading my sheaf of press releases to find out what I actually am GOING to see. This year I’m not looking for any dramatic product category breakthroughs. Instead I’m on the prowl for stuff that makes our life easier, especially when it comes to food and eating related tasks.

The iGrill Bluetooth thermometer mentioned yesterday is a good place to start. It’s pretty intuitive how it works without knowing much more than the name. You can be sitting in front of the game indoors and still monitor the temperature of your meat (or perhaps the internal temperature of the grilling chamber) and when it’s done, get up and waddle out into the sunlight to collect your perfectly smoked brisket.

At $99, the iGrill seems a bit pricey for a one-trick pony. It would be nice if, after reading the temperature, it can do something for you… like turn off the heat (if it’s a gas grill) or dump a fresh supply of wood or charcoal on the fire. And hey, how about a really smart convection oven that can show you temperature and airflow in your oven in a heat map diagram on your iPad and you can move your finger around to adjust things? Or, a device that releases an even supply of steam inside the oven to produce a perfect loaf of crusty bread? That doesn’t need to be electronic, probably, just a fancy teapot with tricky vents and valves. I’m digressing a bit…

Lots of devices are integrated systems these days…. think of your dishwasher, or clothes washer, and the multiple functions that happen at the touch of a button. These things are controlled electronically, so theoretically it does not seem to me complicated or expensive to add a software interface that lets you monitor and modify what’s going on. Then add the Bluetooth connection and software on the computing device, and you’re in business, right?

Every year there are a number of platform areas at CES…. a number of vendors following a common standard such as X-10 or Zigbee. The booths often seem kind of sad and underfunded and it’s hard to see them starting a revolution. Meanwhile some of the big vendors, often Panasonic, will develop a technology on their own and if it takes off then others adopt it. Such is the inefficient platform development system in conumser electronics.

I’d also like to see a solution that lets you retrofit a remote control, software based interface to legacy gadgets… like Slingbox, but for my bread machine. I have been fiddling with one of these devices and it shows promise. So, what if I want to set it from the road to turn on and have a hot fresh loaf waiting when I come home? Slingbox’s secret is that it uses infrared technology,… a communications channel between the home entertainment system and a remote that is already there. The only interface to the bread machine is your finger. But, you’re saying, I could do all the programming and have some kind of delayed device to give power to the machine. That might work on some models but not mine; you have to unplug then plug it back in to input cycle instructions.

I am eager to see if some smarter soul has figured out some of these things for me…..

Terra Madre Day celebrated by Saratoga Slow Food

Yesterday was the local observance of Slow Food’s Terra Madre (Mother Earth) Day, sponsored and beautifully organized and presented in the kitchens and dining room of Schenectady County Community College chef and Saratoga chapter president Rocco Verrigni. I sat in on a mega panel discussion followed by a mega tasting of fare prepared by rising chefs; there were also student presentations and a screening of the short film “Green Beef”.

Chefs and farmers in the kitchen on Terra Madre day

The panel discussion featured local farmers (from Saratoga Springs down to the area below the Mohawk River), chefs and restaurateurs discussing their “successes, issues and stories”. Successes for me included clues of how these folks are taking small steps to become commercially viable. Tod Murphy of Vermont’s Farmer’s Diner has the goal of serving local and naturally raised meals at prices farmers can actually afford; he does this by negotiating with farmers a scale larger than boutique/retail/farmers market enterprises and by staying away from steaks. Michael Kilpatrick, a local farmer, described his success in bringing year-round vegetable growing to Saratoga; he is just 23 and I am happy he will be around far longer than me.

Slow Food snail cookies baked by SCCC students

Michael was one of several to describe an “issue”: it’s difficult to follow the national standards for “Certified Organic” so as a result none of them does it. Kilpatrick Family Farm can’t be organic because they use a sheeting product called Biotelo for their winter mulching and though biodegradable, it’s not organic-approved. Noah Sheetz, executive chef of the governor’s mansion in Albany, described another problem, which is the practicality of coordinating multiple purveyors for poultry, produce, dairy etc. plus having a backup when somebody’s delivery truck breaks down. Sysco, by offering one-stop shopping for quality products, has made it too easy for many kitchens; what’s needed is a Sysco for natural producers.

Chef Christopher Tanner and his meat curing closet

The food presentations ranged from a perfect half moon of roasted acorn squash to a groaning board of charcuterie prepared by the SCCC students in Garde Manger II, which has done nothing but make sausage all semester long. Chef Christopher Tanner showed off his curing closet for prosciutto and Westphalian ham, made by stripping the shelves from a wine cabinet and adding an off-the-shelf humidifier. Local students pay just $3533 for learning all this and virtually all of them are offered jobs in the industry at the end of their two-year program.

During the breaks there was plenty of time to talk with local farmers and make new friends along with lists of places to go and dine and find new food near Saratoga. The only bad news is that the season has ended for many of these folks (which is why they could take the day off) so I’ll have to wait for spring for many of my forays.