Mas Geek

Mayo and Nutella: Spoon Your Way to Health!

Have you guys seen the new ads for Hellman’s mayo and Nutella?  The ads position the products as natural and healthy via word trickery and warm, pleasing imagery.

Hellman’s latest campaign is all about how “real” their mayo is, with its real eggs, real vinegar, and real oil (no mention of the real cholesterol and fat).

The Nutella ads, aimed at children, talk about how Nutella can be part of a healthy breakfast. Just spread it on your favorite healthy treat!  Kinda like butter!

The ad highlights all of the delicious hazelnuts and skim milk that are present in Nutella. It fails to mention that the #1 ingredient is sugar and that a single serving (2 tbsp.) contains 11g of fat.

I’m surprised they are running this ad in the lawsuit happy U.S. considering the brand was criticized for making similar claims in the UK in 2007.

A few years ago 7UP got into some trouble because they reformulated the beverage and started describing themselves as “100% natural” despite containing high fructose corn syrup.  They eventually had to drop the claim, since, you know, it was false.

I know that, technically, Hellman’s and Ferrero are just presenting misleading facts and allowing the consumer to jump to their own conclusions (and that this is nothing new in advertising) but it takes balls to market mayonnaise and chocolate spread (sorry, hazelnut spread) as ingredients belonging in a healthy diet.

The Hellman’s ads don’t bother me as much because the natural angle is slightly different than the healthy one (though clearly it’s implied that real=healthy=eat a tub of mayo) and they point you to their site where you can find several healthy recipes. And well, I just really love mayo.  But the Nutella ads are a bit much, especially since they are aimed at children who are going to see those ads and say, c’mon Dad, gimme more, it’s healthy!

It would be so refreshing if a brand like these came out and said, listen, our stuff is the shit, it tastes good and makes other stuff tastes good too. But that awesomeness comes at a price so learn how to control yourself and not get type-2 diabetes.  Gravy: Perfect for cheat day!

Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards

So, this is exciting, huh?

Google and the WPP Group have launched the 2^nd round of the research program they jointly created to improve understanding and practices in online marketing, and to better understand the relationship between online and offline media. The Google and WPP Marketing Research Awards Program expects to support up to 25 awards in the range from $50,000 to $80,000. Awards will be in the form of unrestricted gifts to academic institutions, under the names of the researchers who submitted the proposal. Award recipients will be invited to participate in a meeting highlighting work in this area and will be encouraged to make their results available online and in professional publications.

Google’s comprehensive approach to their business is brilliant.  They don’t stop at hiring only the best and the brightest to address their current needs and develop new solutions but they also reach out to academia to fund research into the future of their industry.  Google and WPP won’t own the research outright but they will obviously have a leg up on everyone else when it comes to leveraging the results and funding further research.

Topics they expect to cover in the first round include:

• Online and offline media interaction
• Relevance and effectiveness measurement
• Audience types and engagement
• Verticals & New Media

Google and WPP are making a huge amount of proprietary data available to the researchers to aid in their exploration of these issues.  What a dream for data junkies.

A list of the projects, researchers, and institutions being supported in the first round of the program can be found here.

The video below introduces the program and some of the research that is going on: