Oh snap! New baby carrot campaign mimics junk food; Guy Shelmerdine directs
By Emily Fredrix, Marketing Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --Baby carrot farmers are launching a campaign that pitches the little, orange, crunchy snacks as daring, fun and naughty — just like junk food.
A group of 50 carrot producers hopes the ‘Eat ‘Em Like Junk Food’ effort starting this week will double the $1 billion market in two or three years.
The goal is to get people to think of baby carrots as a brand they can get excited about — not just a plain, old vegetable. A baby carrots website features metal music and deep male voices chanting “Baby. Carrots. Extreme.” On social networking site Twitter, the campaign’s account suggests people eat them “like there’s no tomorrow (maybe there won’t be…)”
“This campaign is about turning baby carrots into a brand,” said Jeff Dunn, CEO of Bolthouse Farms, the nation’s top baby carrot producer with 50 percent of the market, and the most to gain if the market grows. “We think ultimately long-term here we’re going to turn it into a very vital brand in the mind of consumers.”
The plan begins in Cincinnati and Syracuse, N.Y., and will take at least a year to go national.
But carrot eaters around the country will get a taste of baby carrots’ attempt at attitude with Scarrots next month. The Halloween version of baby carrots will come in spooky packaging and have glow-in-the-dark temporary tattoos, ideal for giving out to trick-or-treaters, Dunn said.
The marketing campaign by Crispin Porter + Bogusky, known for its edgy advertising of Burger King and Old Navy, will cost about $25 million.
Television ads–directed by Guy Shelmerdine of Smuggler–depict futuristic scientists studying crunch, a woman lusting after carrots and carrot sports featuring a young man who launches off a snowy mountain top in a grocery cart and catches in his mouth a carrot shot by a gun below. Music for the spots was composed by Andrew Feltenstein and John Nau of Beacon Street Studios, with Paul Hurtubise serving as sound designer/mixer. Editor was Chan Hatcher of No. 6 Edit. VFX house was Method.
The campaign also features billboards with messages like “Our crunch can beat up your crunch” and carrot vending machines in schools.
Stores will carry new packaging in crinkly, festive bags reminiscent of chip bags with designs that mimic the ads. There’s a bright green one with a hip red bunny wearing sunglasses, and dark, futuristic packaging with bright orange lines coming out of a carrot.
The carrot group and its agency studied other campaigns — such as the “Drink Milk” effort” — and decided to push further with baby carrots, beyond marketing the benefits of the vegetables.
“You didn’t need to talk about any of the health benefits. Everyone knows carrots are good for you,” said Tiffany Rolfe, vice president and group creative director at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. “Our goal was to separate it from being a vegetable as much as possible, to create a new category for carrots.”
Sales of baby carrots — which are, in fact, not babies at all but rather small, peeled carrot shapes cut from larger ones — have fallen in the mid-single digits in the past two years as people spend less in the down economy, Dunn said. That includes buying bigger carrots and cutting them up themselves to save money.
Baby carrots were introduced in the mid- to late 1980s, created for their convenience of being an easy snack. Sales grew quickly in the first 10 to 15 years, but the growth tapered off, Dunn said.
For now the campaign will roll out gradually and focus on marketing. But Dunn, a former president and chief operating officer of Coca-Cola North America, said new variations could be developed, including baby carrots with ranch flavoring.
“How high is up?” he said of the market’s potential. “That’s the real question, what’s possible here? We put it out there, and we’ll learn and evolve.”
See the “Extreme” spot below. The full campaign can be seen here.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More