Stay Tuned/A Strand Of Tinsel

I admit that the title is a bit cryptic, so I'll explain hastily: This year's final report on the Christmas marketing madness concerns unlikely seasonal tie-ins. The strand of tinsel - long, thin, and fairly flimsy - is the metaphorical one which the advertisements below are using to connect their products to a holiday they have little or nothing to do with.

It's one thing, after all, to have a nice juicy turkey being advertised with a holiday slant - people really do consume a lot of turkeys at Christmas time. In fact, the manufacturer's usual problem is getting people to buy them the rest of the year - which is my theory behind why you see more turkey burgers, turkey lunchmeat, et cetera on the shelves than you used to - it's those turkey manufacturers trying to build a stable year-round cash flow.

But when I see an ad which hawks Tic Tac breath mints - and see it I do, it's right here in front of me - I wonder who's been trying to use that strand of tinsel to hitch themselves a ride on the holiday sleigh, if you'll forgive the metaphor. "Tis the season to breathe friendly." You can't get much more contrived than that.

Pillsbury isn't bothering with tie-ins for individual products this year. Pillsbury sells so many little tubes of non-puff-pastry "crescent rolls" and holiday sugar cookies during this season that all they need is a gentle reminder. So I have here an ad which says "Enjoy the Magic of the Holidays with Butter and Pillsbury." That's not a very unlikely strand of tinsel, but by picturing representative items from their entire family of products (a little Progresso soup for Christmas, anyone?) they are implicitly trying to let some of their other products ride on the coattails of their seasonal surge in not-yet-baked-goods items.

Pillsbury, by the by, has taken to using the slogan "More Time For the Magic," which just goes back to what I said about them a few weeks ago. I love it when corporations confirm my estimations of their attitudes.

Pillsbury's tactics amuse me, but their reasoning is sound. If you sell a food product which is not commonly consumed to excess during the holidays, you may get lucky and be able to join forces with a foodstuff which is. If you're selling turkey stuffing, great. (Unless it's made with hamburgers.) If you're selling Andes mints, the connection to a turkey is rather more unlikely.

But here's an ad with a nice stuffed turkey and a bowl of Andes mints standing nearby. "Andes Complements your Meal" says the caption. To help soothe the silliness, there is also a coupon for two dollars off any Butterball turkey, but this effort at misdirection does not succeed in disguising how tenuous this strand of tinsel truly is.

A better effort - one which at least elicits the right kind of amusement - is a picture of a ham sandwich being made, with the caption "Holiday leftovers taste better with French's!" If you're going to tie mustard to Christmas, that's the way to do it.

Tis the easy Prince dish that makes a family jolly.
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-lasagna!

I don't make this stuff up.

Yep, if there is no way for you to sneak semi-legitimately onto the Christmas bandwagon, then you have to resort to cutesy copy to provide your strand of tinsel. "Stuff their stockings with Reach toothbrushes." If I ever got a toothbrush in my stocking, I'd have defected from my family.

There is no way to write copy like this without looking ridiculous. On the other hand, there are probably some people right now who are reflecting that maybe a toothbrush really would be a sorta nifty thing to put in Timmy's stocking. And then there are those who buy the toothbrushes and stick them in as a comment on how bad all that Christmas candy is for your teeth - but we're not interested in the way holidays are celebrated at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

And even this is not the bottom of the barrel. In my book, that would be the picture of Santa holding a package of Zantac antacid, with the copy "The one package Santa opens BEFORE Christmas."

The nasty thing about some of these odd strands of tinsel is that they gradually acquire legitimacy. The people at Reynolds Aluminum have been hawking their colored plastic wrap as an interesting way to "brighten up your holiday cakes and food gifts," and I have been laughing at them for it, for several years now ... but I'm seeing more and more items wrapped in this horrid stuff coming to office parties and the like, from people who would normally have better taste. Repeat it often enough and it loses some ludicrousness.

You'll note that I haven't bothered to explain why manufacturers are so hep to spin these shaky strands of tinsel in the first place - but then, you probably already know why. We have become a nation of seasonal purchasers. Many manufacturers - and not just of gift items, but of some foodstuffs as well - now only turn profitable in the last two months of the year. It is a delicate and dangerous situation, and one which will not be kind to any of us in the long run.

This is not just a matter of purchasing for other people. The Wall Street Journal notes that we are also increasingly using the season as a time to make all the luxury purchases for ourselves that we can't bring ourselves to buy during the rest of the year.

I have seen at least two ads which play to this directly. The better one of the two is an ad for a Bose radio which says, "Makes a great gift. On the other hand, you've been very, very good this year."

The spiral continues unabated.

[February 2007:] As has been previously noted, Reynolds is now owned by Alcoa, but this not prevented them from continuing to market multicolored plastic films.

"Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-lasagna!" continues to make me wince, lo these many years later.

and now back to our program

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