Kellogg’s CornFakes

It’s being put about by their PR team that Kellogg’s are to individually laser etch each of their cornflakes with the company logo. Is it too much to suggest that this might not be absolutely true?

Kellogg’s conflakes laser etched

We’ve all become used to ever more sophisticated and cynical advertising from the food industry as companies have cottoned on to the fact that tinkering with loved brands or unexpectedly removing favourite chocolate bars from the shelves has a desirable viral marketing effect which they can respond to by ‘bringing back’ the product. I blame Coca-Cola. All this trickery means that we tend to view most of the releases and announcements that come from our PR friends with an even healthier dose of suspicion than even our former jaded paranoia.

So what to make of this jaunty little announcement from Kellogg’s yesterday? “Now you’ll always be able to tell your Corn Flakes from your corn fakes!”

The story is, apparently, that the company has new laser technology ready to toast the tiny logo onto a zillion little flakes a day: “We’ve established that it is possible to apply a logo or image onto food, now we need to see if there is a way of repeating it on large quantities of our cereal. We’re looking into it,” the company’s food technologist, Helen Lyons is reported as saying. When we phoned for confirmation we were told that she’s “on holiday at the moment”. Hmm.

Shortly before throwing her Blackberry to the wind and hotfooting it out of Kellogg’s HQ to pack her holiday suitcase, Ms Lyons told the Metro, Mail and Telegraph that “giving our golden flakes of corn an official stamp of approval could be the answer”. At last technology has made it possible to confound the makers of all those damned inferior flakes that would masquerade as Kellogg’s.

Presumably the technology isn’t that ready at all, given it hasn’t been used in the photograph above, which is, instead, ahem, digitally manipulated.

So what do we think ? is it an important development in food branding technology?

How about they try doing it with Rice Krispies 

Coca-Cola ads …. banned

Coca-Cola’s banned ads for its Glaceau Vitamin Water range

A series of ads for Coca-Cola’s Glaceau Vitamin Water range have been banned for making misleading health and nutrition claims, in part because the drinks are sugar-laden.

Coca-Cola, which made the very high-profile $4.1bn acquisition of Glaceau in 2007 to boost its nutritional product range, ran a series of three poster ads for different drinks in the range.

One poster, for the Power-C drink, ran with the line “More muscles than Brussels” with text including “Popeye had it easy …”; another had the headline “Keep perky when you are feeling murky” with a reference to using the drink to ward off illness and use work sick days to “just, erm, not go in”. A third poster made references to the benefits of vitamins and avoiding a trip to “the doctor’s waiting room”.

The Advertising Standards Authority received three complaints, which argued that the ads misleadingly implied that vitamins in the drinks conferred health benefits and made them equivalent, or even superior to, vegetables – and that the drinks made people resistant to illness. Two of the complainants argued that the advertising positioned the drinks as healthy when in fact they contained high levels of sugar.

Coke said the ads were “humorous and irreverent” and that the the products could actually be described as “low calorie” according to EU nutrition and health claims regulations.

The ASA upheld all the complaints against the three ads. The watchdog said Coca-Cola had not provided evidence to support the various claims made in the ads and had breached the advertising code.

It ruled the company should not run them again.

The ASA also said the drinks could not be considered to be “healthy” because each 500ml bottle contained 26% of the recommended daily allowance of sugar.

“Because we considered the ads made claims that were likely to be understood as referring to the nutritional and health benefits of the drinks, it was likely that, in conjunction with these claims, readers would infer that the range of drinks were ‘healthy’,” said the ASA. “Because the drinks contained a significant proportion of a consumer’s RDA for sugar we concluded the ads were likely to mislead.”

So many sugar riddled drinks out there … should we not just be chowing down on some good fruit and Veg and getting the water down us ?

Im sure that would be cost effective also ! Your thoughts please …

Internet now bigger than TV ?

Spending on internet advertising in Britain grew 4.6 percent in the first half of 2009, outperforming the wider ad sector, which slumped 17 percent, and making it the country’s biggest ad medium ahead of TV.

Online advertising spend grew to £1.75 billion pounds, with the medium accounting for 23.5 percent of all spend, ahead of television for the first time.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) biannual report, a survey conducted independently by PricewaterhouseCoopers and WARC, said key drivers of the growth were marketers using online as a direct response medium, “taking advantage of its targeting, accountability and measurability”, and booming e-commerce activity.

“This is the first major market where online has overtaken television to become the biggest single medium,” said Guy Phillipson, chief executive of the IAB. “This is a significant milestone.”

According to the report, the internet accounted for 23.5 percent of all spend, compared with 18.7 percent in the first half of 2008.

Television accounted for 21.9 percent, press display for 18.5 percent and direct mail for 11.5 percent.

The IAB report said the internet had avoided the advertising slump in general media, due to the strong demand for paid-for search on sites such as Google and resilience shown by classified online ads.

The study abreaks down the online display market by industry category, with technology the biggest spender, accounting for 19.1% of the market, followed by telecoms (13.3% rising from 9.7% the previous year) and finance (13.2% up from 11.9%).

Consumer goods saw significant growth up from 6.2% in H1 2008 to 8.1% in 2009 as FMCG marketers steadily increased digital budgets.

So what is going to happen to our could old Telly Box ? Will the new age family cather around the Laptop to watch the TV and what will all the living room furniture point to ?

Who ever knows whats around the corner with exciting changes in media – this article just sparks off many more questions indeed.