I saw an ad for Nutella the other day. Not this one, but similar:
It just blew my mind, because the ad I saw (and this one too—I guess it's all part of a concerted campaign) sounded like it came straight out of the 50s.
Not a word about how healthful or low in fat Nutella is; nothing about how it'll unclog your arteries or provide necessary nutrients or that it's the "responsible" thing for you to feed you kids. No—instead, it talks about how it tastes good, how it makes food more appetizing so that you kids willingly eat breakfast and have the energy to tackle the day.
On the one hand, how long has it been since there was any kind of problem in the USA with kids not having enough caloric intake before school? I can almost see the pressure groups making up their signs already about how irresponsible Nutella is being by marketing sweet chocolatey spread to impressionable kids.
But on the other, I just have to say it's bracing and refreshing to see an ad like this, because it's just genuinely alien by this point in history. I haven't seen an ad that uses vocabulary like this since the ones Lileks showcases wherein the manufacturers of breakfast cereal and Spam urge housewives to dig and scramble to find new ways to make food "appetizing" and "wholesome" in order to support the war effort. Can't have a pale, anemic workforce shuffling its way listlessly to the office or the factory floor, not when our boys are on the front lines!
Is this what European advertising is like? Does Nutella know what it's getting into by trying to crack the American market with a prime-time ad campaign?
Brian Tiemann
