Art is life. There I was last week wittering on about the general uselessness of EU-funded campaigns and up pops the British Brassica Bureau (or similar) to announce it has secured a trailer full of dosh (“taxpayers’ hard-earned cash”, as Daddy puts it) for its Love Your Greens campaign. This is so utterly fatuous (apparently greens are quick, easy versatile and tasty - who knew?) even we at P&F could have produced it.
But then, there’s no accounting for stupidity. Otherwise why would, according to this week’s survey, 50% of Britons be unaware that we grow strawberries here? It’s not because the British Strawberry Bureau (or similar) has failed. Perhaps people are too busy looking for a Coke can with their name on it to care. Yes, Coca-Cola’s odd exercise in impersonal personalisation is back, this time with some 1,000 variants. Titania won’t be one of them (it’s not chavvy enough), but stores will be full of Kelseys and Madisons desperately destroying the merchandising to see if they are named and shamed.
Actually, there’s one positive development in this cynical appeal for a bigger share of the dim pound. A selection of nicknames will be featured for the first time. Coke gives ‘Mate’ and ‘Bestie’ as examples, but if they’ve got an eye on volume, they’ll be rolling out ‘Fatso’, ‘Lard Arse’, and ‘Clinically Obese’, as potential best-sellers.
Meanwhile, news that Cadbury Dairy Milk has been certified as pork-free following an earlier test scare is a bonus for the snack company with the silly name. The danger is it may inspire Mondelez’s clearly psychotic NPD team to further flights of product-pairing fancy. Chocolate-covered pork pies, anyone?
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