Sausage-fest

I was going to call this post "Advertising designed to play on people's paranoia," but when will I ever get to title a post "Sausage-fest" again?


Deceptive advertising is nothing new to Russia or anywhere else for that matter, but this ad (seen in the metro in late November) takes bizarre advertising "logic" to new levels. Let me try to translate the various text and captions:

Upper left-hand corner: "EXPERIMENT - Using genetic engineering, a frost-resistant breed of tomato has been created... In order to do this, a fish gene was spliced into the plant's DNA."

Upper right-hand corner: "SURPRISING? - What other surprises can be expected from genetically modified food products (GMP)? Many scientists think that the consequences of a diet containing genetically modified food products are unpredictable."

Superimposed on the tomato: "fish?"

Stamped on the tomato: "POSSIBLE DANGER?"

In large white text on the red background (lower half of the poster): "clear [or obvious] confidence!"

Caption under the clover: "Genetically safe product"

Caption at lower right: "The Ostankino meat-processing plant has completely rejected the use of genetically modified components in its products. [in larger font] OSTANKINO / THE NEW STANDARD

How ridiculous is this? Yes, Ostankino uses no genetically modified hog snouts in its fine sausages, and the rats that sometimes fall into the production vats are also 100% natural. I am not saying that Ostankino's sausage is any worse than anyone else's, but does not using genetically modified ingredients necessarily make it that much better? In any event, this article in an ad trade publication , while questioning whether it's possible to have a totally GM-free product that includes soy-based ingredients, acknowledges the cleverness of advertising the company's products as GM-free, because this differentiates Ostankino from its domestic competitors (Mikoyan's somewhat lame branding strategy, for example, focuses on the fact that it's been an official supplier to the Kremlin since 1933).

I guess I wouldn't be surprised if Oscar Meyer had a similar campaign going in the US (Incidentally, the folks at Kraft Foods were apparently a little slow on the uptake with this internet thingy - they failed to grab the oscarmeyer.com and oscar-meyer.com domain names. Whoops. They have made sure that their site is the top result when you google Oscar Meyer, though, so I guess that's something), and I know there are companies that pitch organic hot dogs in the States.

What is interesting about all this is that Ostankino wouldn't run the GM-related ad unless they had some reason to believe that a substantial portion of the population would respond to this pitch, so I guess it resonates with someone out there, just not me.