-
sponsorship
Time for a guessing game. What "things" are being discussed in the following text, excerpted from a forthcoming ad campaign, aimed explicitly at women?
"These things are the best invention since the push-up bra," one woman says. The other, admiring her bra-enhanced chest, responds, "I wouldn't go that far."
Cheeseburgers in a can? Blowguards? Mortgage-backed securities? Tropicana's new packaging? Take 5s? Nope! The correct answer is: Baked Lays. Well, at least it's true that Baked Lays aren't quite as awesome as push-up bras, what with them being salted cardboard and all. (Though the other kind of baked lays, Matthew McConaughey's presumed speciality, are obviously way awesomer than body-sculpting undergarments).
This snippet of dialogue comes from a print ad that is part of Frito-Lays new, big push to sell Baked Lays (and Baked Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, etc.) to women, who snack twice as much as men, just not on salty junk food, a situation that clearly needs rectifying. The Times has the skinny on the "thinking" that went into the new campaign. Some highlights:
Part of the strategy was to tone down the packaging and show off healthy ingredients in the snacks. ... Baked Lay's will no longer be in a shiny yellow bag, but in a matte beige bag that displays pictures of the ingredients like spices or ranch dressing. ... At the grocery store, Frito-Lay will pull all of its women-friendly snacks together at the end of the aisle where possible, Mr. Jones said. Often, he said, the chip aisle is disorganized and unappealing to women.
"The obvious is what's insulting to women," Freud said, like a pink package or something highlighting calories. ... Frito-Lay will introduce television, print and online advertising in early March, that features four cartoon women who are "fab, funny, fearlessly female," who talk about exercising, eating and men—something of an animated "Sex and the City."
I highly recommend reading the article in full because it taught me many, many astounding things besides the fact that ranch dressing is considered a healthy ingredient. Among them: Women feel guilty all the time, about everything, especially eating, but not if what they are eating comes in beige; ads mimicking Sex and the City are not too "obvious"; advertisers are now using "neuroscience" to make assertions about "women's brains" that are so hilariously banal and speciously scientific ("A memory and emotional center, the hippocampus, was proportionally larger in women, so [Lays' advertiser] concluded that women would look for characters they could empathize with.") I'm fairly certain Clueless's Cher Horowitz—"Sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex"—has gone into advertising.