Now first off, count me as a skeptic on this one. I mean seriously, no shuttle flight has ever taken some beer up into space with them to drink? No one ever cracked a beer on the international space station?

So how did a Natural Light end up in space? You guessed it: Facebook. Yep. Because nothing is ever allowed to happen nowadays unless it originated from Facebook. Natural Light is encouraging their Facebook fans to present an epic idea to Natty and they’ll put them into action (side note: love that the brand itself doesn’t even bother with calling it “Natural Light” – the fan page is actually called Natty Light).

Two of Natty Lights Facebook fans, Danny and Rich had the idea.  The spacecraft was launched on November 17, 2011 via weather balloon at approx 11:11am and landed back on earth at approx 1:45pm. The assent took about 2hrs rising to an altitude of 90,000ft+. The Aluminum Fullcan spacecraft landed 60 miles from the launch site and took Danny and Rich 2hrs to locate by gps. The spacecraft was composed of a styrofoam cooler carrying the first beer (full beer) in space on board, a gps tracking device, an HD video camera pointed at another (empty) can on the outside of the ship.

Now Natty Light is sharing photos of the beer that made the journey into space and are asking its Facebook fans what they should do with it.

Here’s video of the endeavor:

It seems that every conversation before, during, and immediately after is about planning for Christmas. The Christmas marketing engine starts up right after Halloween and completely eclipses Thanksgiving. Poor Thanksgiving has become a gateway to black Friday sales. I think we need to analyze Thanksgivings failings and come up with a plan.

Lets take a look at the iconic Thanksgiving elements. First off we have the turkey, while there is a dearth of living or animated turkey imagery,

most people think of the brown delicious turkey in the center of the table.

Talk about a mixed message. I mean how are we supposed to get kids interested in Thanksgiving when the first thing you need to do is explain why the cute turkey in the funny hat is now on the dinner table. How is that a fun way to eat. It would be like eating the traditional  rabbit feast at Easter. It just doesn’t work.

Next up, mashed potatoes. When one of the key ingredients to your holiday meal is often used as a simile for blandness (or wallpaper paste), you have a problem. If only mashed potatoes were used in sexy movie/food scenes instead of whipped cream then it might have a little more oomph behind it.

Let’s talk about stuffing, or dressing depending on who you are. You can already see part of the problem right there, who knows what to call it? Is it stuffing when it is cooked in the turkey and dressing outside? Who knows. How can you have an iconic dish when no one can agree on the basics of what kind of bread to use as its base? White bread? Wheat bread? Cornbread? Include sausage or apples or cranberries? These disagreements can turn into street brawls if you aren’t careful.

Lastly I have to mention cranberries. To set the record straight, I love cranberries but I tend to like bitter more than others. Despite Ocean Sprays best efforts, cranberries are just not cool.

The fact that jellied cranberry from a can is one of the symbols for the holiday is really indicative of its stature over all. No one is trying to make canned corned beef the symbol of St. Patrick’s day, why is a can of over sweetened glop a symbol for Thanksgiving?

It’s no wonder that people are overlooking Thanksgiving in favor of  Christmas.

So what do we do about it? I suppose if you are one of those people who start to decorate for Christmas before Thanksgiving then you may not care. For the rest of us we need to find some way to market Thanksgiving as it’s own cool holiday with something for everyone. I think we need to have a new Thanksgiving slogan.

Something like Thanksgiving, it’s time to eat, or  Thanksgiving, the gift of family (OK that might be a tough sell for some), perhaps Thanksgiving, eat your heart out Santa.

And as for a mascot, the Turkey has got to go. You can’t have your mascot be your main course.  Perhaps the cornucopia could be a focal point? Pilgrims have kind of become passe but they could be a good alternative.

What do you thing So Good readers? What can we do to save Thanksgiving? Is it already a lost cause for you? If not I’d love to  hear your suggestions.

In an attempt to turn around a weakening market share in the US, Anheuser-Busch InBev announced yesterday that it was bringing another unnecessary product to market. Similar to the lame ducks of Bud Light Golden Wheat and Bud Light Lime introduced in recent years, AB is taking another long shot at success in Bud Light Platinum.

Instead of going the way of Michelob Ultra and the low-calorie, fit ‘n fun lifestyle, Platinum is reportedly going the other direction, with a boozier (6% alcohol vs. 4.2% for Bud Light) and more caloric (137 vs. 110) beverage.

Seems that AB has picked up the not-so-recent trend of giving people an amped up version of what we are already consuming – more fat, more salt, more sugar, and in this case more booze and calories. What more could we want as Americans?

My issue here is the lack of originality, inherent contradiction, and likely higher price point of this product.

As we all know, there are many beers with higher alcohol content, and often, calories. Fortunately, almost all of these beers taste better than a Bud Light. So what need does this product fill? Why would someone buy this?

Also, how can this beer be called “light” with its calorie infusion?

Finally, have you ever heard of a product with “platinum” in its name that didn’t have a markup?

AB has its work cut out if it wants this beer to sell. They have until January, and I have my doubts.

H/t to Huffington for the top picture.

Like many of you, during college I was not afraid to buy and drink a ton of the cheapest beer I could get my hands on – Stroh’s, Hamm’s, Schaefer, Old Milwaukee, among many others. And while many of these brands have been driven into obscurity, I recently read that old, reliable Pabst Blue Ribbon has been making a major comeback. As reported by Darren Rovell of CNBC:

“Fastest growing domestic beers over last yr by $ %: Pabst Blue Ribbon +14.5%, Yuengling +13%, Bud Select 55 +12.2%, Bud Ice +4.8%”

This was pretty stunning to me, but it probably shouldn’t have been. Thinking back, I recall recently seeing PBR offered in both dive bars and top shelf restaurants. Somehow, the marketing gurus behind this inexpensive, amber beverage have found a way to make it appealing to both the working class/college student, as well as the urban hipster/yuppie crowd.

Pabst is now seen as a cool brand, and touches a piece of nostalgia that giants Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors, and their huge marketing budgets, have not been able to tap into. Apparently, choosing your spots (see top), rather than wall-to-wall ads, can be a winning formula – even when up against an era of mass craft beer production.

It is hard to fake authenticity. And even though PBR is not a good tasting beer, it has carved its own niche into the culture, and the revenue uptick, among a landscape of decreasing profits, shows the bottom line.

What are your thoughts on Pabst? Are you an occasional partaker? Is it possible that the resurgence is related to their sterling new ad campaign?

There is also a related segment of this discussion about HFCS, and that is why it is so cheap, and why the surplus of corn is so vast that food manufacturers are shoving it in to products where it really has no business being.

But that isn’t what this article is all about. In the wake of the negative publicity HFCS is receiving, the Corn Refiners Association has decided on a new approach. “Let’s just rebrand HFCS as Corn Sugar, that way the people who are shopping and have been trained to avoid HFCS will be duped into buying our products again.” Oh wait, not duped; according to the Corn Refiners Association website  “Relabeling high fructose corn syrup as “corn sugar” would enable consumers to easily identify added sugars in the diet.”

Seriously? Intentionally obfuscating a standard household name for a product is going to make it easier for consumers?

Despite the fact that the Corn Refiners Association claims the name changed is approved by the FDA, the FDA would beg to differ. Unfortunately, the FDA is toothless in this case. They can’t prohibit the Corn Refiners from using the name as a part of their marketing, since it is not an actual product they, themselves, are selling. They can only go after manufacturers who use the name Corn Sugar as a part of their own product label. But will they?

It should be insulting that the corn processing industry thinks that consumers would fall for such a tactic, but sadly I think they are right. It could take the general public years to come to grips with this change in terminology, during which time much of the progress that has been made in educating consumers on which products should or shouldn’t contain added sweeteners would be lost.

“I vant to eat your cereal!”

Count Chocula had the richest and most satisfying cocoa flavor of the bunch, and it was also the most similar to  real chocolate. Although cocoa pebbles might have given it a run for its money, getting to stare into that nostalgia-filled vampire visage secured Count Chocula’s place in the top spot. You can check out the count through the years on this poorly-designed website.

“He looks, like, a suave guy.” – Betsy, my roommate

Personally, I thought the boo berry was the least compelling mascot of the three, but both my roommates found the dark circles under his eyes vaguely attractive. Go figure. Anyway, this was our least favorite cereal. Although we could detect a hint of blueberry muffins, the cereal itself didn’t actually have much flavor. It got better when paired with the marshmallows, which were sweet and sort of milky, and better than Lucky Charms.

Has strawberries for fingernails.

Franken Berry isn’t quite as famous as the other two, having debuted on the market two years later in 1973. We liked the fact that he has strawberries for fingernails, though. And he kind of looks like someone that would be in a Pixar movie. We found the cereal’s Day-glo pink color a little disarming at first, especially when I read online that the dye in the cereal used to turn children’s poop pink. The flavor, sadly, was a similar situation to Boo Berry – weak and not strawberry-like on its own, pretty good with the marshmallows.

It’s not every day you get to have a bowl of pop culture for breakfast.

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Unlike those examples though, some of these participants were not so willing and delighted to have been fed frozen food. Food Mayhem seemed the most angry, penning an “Open Letter to George Duran” in which he lambasted the chef and ConAgra for serving him a frozen dish packed full of preservatives – shortly after, as part of their pre-dinner discussion, he railed against foods loaded with sodium and preservatives. His eyebrows were raised even before “the big reveal” when his wife, after noting an allergy to food coloring, was served a zucchini dish instead of the lasagna everyone else was served – because the lasagna had food coloring in it. Why, he wondered would a chef need to use food coloring in a freshly prepared lasagna dish?

He wasn’t the only blogger upset about the experience. Mom Confessionals & Chubby Chinese Girl also expressed their displeasure at both being “duped” as well as being fed processed foods that they wouldn’t normally choose to put into their bodies. News of this blunder by ConAgra and the PR firm involved, Ketchum, has quickly spread to many other websites.

This is a classic PR blunder of not knowing your audience. Whopper Freakout worked brilliantly because those people already LOVED Whoppers. Their reactions were genuine and real. The Pizza Hut Pasta and Carl’s Jr. “Fake Restaurant” campaigns seemed successful and lacked blow back because the participants appeared to be more of the “people off the street” type who were happy to get a free meal and amused to discover the food they enjoyed was fast food. Ketchum screwed up, big time. The people they invited to this invite were either foodies – advocates of organic or preservative free eating, or mom bloggers, who frequently talk about the stresses of juggling family and personal life (and re-arranged busy lives or got baby sitters in order to attend).

Someone at Ketchum should have seen this coming, and they didn’t. They failed to anticipate the anger that some in this group of people were bound to feel in being “duped” as well as the anger people that closely monitor what they put into their bodies would feel after being secretly fed frozen food.

This post cannot be properly concluded without imagining (and wishing) that someone at one of these dinners had a reaction like this:

How exactly that would work is a little unclear, but it’s an interesting gimmick and attention grabber. And it DOES fit with the general Burger King ad campaigns which frequently surprise, create controversy and cross the boundaries of poor taste.

In the video, the students suggest that “The King” would somehow intercept or light something off of the actual Olympic torch once it reached London, and he would then “take back” this Olympic fire to all the BK’s of the world. This appears to just be a student project that is unsanctioned by Burger King (I could be wrong about that) but if that is the case, I wonder how crazy BK is about them using The King, BK logo and nabbing Facebook.com/olympicwhopper.

This is a catchy and bizarre enough idea however, that I bet this ad goes viral, and BK, whether involved or not, will get attention, derision and bemusement from it.

UPDATE: And just as quickly as it was there, it’s gone. The Vimeo video is now “private” and the Facebook page has been shutdown. Glad I at least grabbed the three images you see above!

UPDATE #2: You can view the ad HERE.

Wow. That’s pretty blatant. To say right on your wrapper that your product is “Not For Girls”??? After seeing this, I was wondering how Nestle didn’t take some flack for it. I mean, I’m a comedian, marketing guy and food blogger, who finds things like this mildly amusing. But surely other people must think/have thought this is a pretty sexist marketing tactic, no? I mean we wouldn’t tolerate a candy bar that say’s “It’s Not for (insert ethnic group, minority group, political group, religion etc. here).”

Turns out this campaign has been around quite a while, launching in the spring of 2002. At the time it did catch some flack. When the campaign first launched, it used slogans in TV ads and on posters such as: “It’s not for girls”, “don’t feed the birds”, “not available in pink” and “King size, not Queen size.” Wow. The back of the wrapper even features the phrase “Do Not Feed the Birds” (In Britain, “bird” is a slang term for woman or girl). The wrapper was supplemented with TV ads in which the only way girls could buy a Yorkie bar was to try and dress up to pretend and be a guy:

Yorkie/Nestle, when they released the ads, talked about “reclaiming” chocolate bars for men, since so much of chocolate advertising is aimed at women. This Yorkie campaign attempts to make eating chocolate bars a thing that is ok for gruff, manly men to do again.

Well So Good readers, what do you think? A little harmless fun by Nestle? A deliberately controversial campaign that was made purely to draw attention and press? Blatentently sexist? A subtle appeal to women by trying to entice them into buying something they “shouldn’t” be trying to buy? Effective? Ineffective? Offensive? Fun?

Domino’s is bringing the Noid back for one week only, in the form of the Noid’s Super Pizza Shootout game. The premise? The Noid has stolen 10,080 gift cards for a free pizza and Domino’s will be giving one out each MINUTE of the week to the highest round score at any given minute. Huh. Here’s what the game looks like, which can be played on the Domino’s Facebook page:

Back when Domino’s was one of my clients I was emphatic about their need to bring back The Noid at some point. There is just a ton of retro love for this guy. I’m glad to see The Noid make his return, even if it is just on Facebook and not in TV ads.