During my last diatribe, I failed to emphasize how ridiculous it is to advertise electricity, either through "branding" or through making qualitative claims.  Basically, I had bigger fish to fry: Duke Energy, the lying bastards.

There are two fundamental strategies in advertising: you can name qualities of the product that make it superior or you can throw a bunch of pleasant images at a corporation's name and hope they stick.  Generally, companies steer away from naming the qualities of their products, for a number of reasons.  Most of the time, the product has no intrinsic qualities to make it superior to the competition.  After all, if it did, the advertising would be mostly superfluous.  In addition, you can get into trouble when you state that your product is superior, especially if you name your competitors and compare yourself favorably with them in an ad.  Papa John's Pizza got into trouble with Pizza Hut over ads claiming (what seems true to me) that PJ's pies are better than PH's.  The irony of this is that legally the superlative terms PJ's used have no determined meaning.  So PH's law suit charging that PJ was engaged in unfair competition because they used comparative terms should have had no legal standing.  PH won, sort of, and now PJ's ads compare themselves to an unnamed competitor (in fact, the logos of the competition in the new ads look more like Domino's than Pizza Hut).

I'm not sure what the lesson is there.  When your company produces a better product, you can shout this from the rooftops, as long as you don't say who you're better than.  Something like that.

The reason I bring this up is that for years Heinz, which makes incontrovertibly the finest ketchup available in the universe, has been using low-key ads, mostly print, saying essentially that Heinz makes the only ketchup worthy of the name, and this has seemed perfectly natural to me.  Why Heinz would even need to advertise, except to remind people of their name, is beyond me: anyone who has tasted Heinz and any other ketchup simply must prefer Heinz.  (No doubt there are a few who will buy and pretend to enjoy Del Monte's bland, watery, over-salted "Catsup" or Hunt's tomato-soup-in-a-bottle that they try to pass off as the genuine article, but it's safe to say none of those people hold steady jobs or function at any sustainable level in society.)

If Heinz is to advertise, it is obvious to me that all they need do is note the clear superiority of their ketchup and let it go at that.  Maybe give us a coupon every two months or so - however long they figure a standard-issue American family takes to get through a bottle.

So what impelled the Heinz people to begin their current ad campaign is beyond my ken.  First of all, the ads are, at bottom, branding ads, despite some reference to the tastiness of the ketchup.  But more strangely, the branding effort suggests that Heinz believes they haven't reached the ideal market penetration for 18-29 year-old goofs.

One of the ads I see most often shows an ugly brown plastic plate with a burger on it, topped with a generous glob of ketchup.  The soundtrack for this shot is a sort of up-tempo pop music thing.  A hand carrying a bun descends upon the burger, squishing the ketchup around the edges of the top bun (a ritual many of us who ketchup our burgers perform with fond and reverent regularity), and getting a daub of it on the index finger.  The voice over offers the "warning" that if you get Heinz ketchup on your finger, "you might want to eat that finger."  The ad concludes with a tagline: best with food.

That kind of silly line is a common tactic lately in ads targeting young people.  The implication of such lines is that it would be necessary to explain the use of the product, and the joke is that, since it's ketchup, it's obvious what the use is.  The reason this is supposed to be funny is partly a paean to self-depricating humor (the ads appeal to viewers as people with real or put-on self-esteem problems), and partly a jab at authority (the ads suggest that someone else holds the viewers in low esteem, believing them to need this instruction).  In this there's a very low-level subterranean irreverence meant to capture the attention of youth.  Jeans, movies, soft drinks, and most everything else are sold to kids this way, usually by corporations with as much power as Heinz.

Heinz began this campaign quietly, at about the same time they started selling green ketchup.  The marketing people told them that little kids enjoy playing with food and enjoy coloring, and so would enjoy multi-colored ketchup.  I don't know whether they sell much of the green product, but I do know they took the opportunity to print up a few batches of wacky labels with the same basic message the TV ads present.  I own a bottle labeled simply "NOT GREEN," which struck me as funny at first - ketchup for the blind, as it were.  Some others said "USE ON FOOD," essentially the same as the TV ad tagline.

Another TV ad is hoping to connect the two strategies explicitly for the slower of our young people's minds, by focusing on the label.  The spot features a kid peering at the bottle neck with puzzlement.  The voiceover explains that "we're not sure what 'Est'd' means, but Heinz seems to be proud of it."  The ploy once again interpolates and calls the viewer (as they say in narrative theory); here, not only does the content of the ad appeal to a certain alleged youth mentality, it also incorporates the viewer into that mentality by speaking for the viewer - the viewer has become part of the "we" who does not know what "Est'd" means.

Once you are included, you'll get the "in" gag, I assume is the point.  Then you'll go read the label to see where it says "Est'd," presumably to ponder this strange sign with your youthful friends, and then you'll notice that some of the bottles offer you the further information that the product is to be used with food, or that it is not green.

Too clever by half.  When I was a kid, I grew up with blatant hard-sell advertising, none of which attempted to convince me I was part of a subculture.  Kids today grow up with the constant mass-marketed message that they are much too cool to be affected by the mass marketing of a product.  It's gonna screw up their senses of identity, I'm sure of it.  They won't even be able to take refuge in irony, because irony has been sold to them their whole lives.  There's nowhere for them to hide.

If it were any other product, I'd never buy it again out of resentment at this manipulative and evil strategy.  But I can't boycott Heinz ketchup any more than I can boycott Duke Energy.