It’s not too often that an ad campaign goes from startlingly stupid to strangely brilliant with a swapped-out voiceover, but Miracle Whip pulled off that trick with some of their most recent ads. And like a lot of things that are brilliant, Stephen Colbert is involved.
But first, some context: The branding folks at Miracle Whip were noticing that Miracle Whip users are skewing older, and they needed a way to reinvent the brand for the younger crowd. The result?
No, seriously.
It’s an oddly unironic mixed-up bag of Generation Y clichés: Rooftop parties! Dancing in wading pools! Anachronistic Polaroid cameras! And most importantly, individualism!
Throughout the ad, a voiceover reads off epigrams emphasizing just how unique Miracle Whip -- and by extension, its users -- is: “Don’t go noticed.” “Don’t blend in.” “Don’t be ordinary, boring, or bland.”
By the time a young woman seductively walks towards the camera holding a jar of Miracle Whip and the voiceover declares, “We are Miracle Whip, and we will not tone it down,” I’m completely flummoxed: what exactly are they suggesting?
That I can be all hip and rebellious by using Miracle Whip? That I can be the coolest kid in school by slathering some of the Whip on my Krishna lunch? Or that cute girls will be all over me if they think that I, too, like a little tangy zip in my life?
Regardless, they’re serious about -- albeit not particularly adept at -- this cater-to-the-young’uns strategy: They’ve got a Facebook page that proudly claims that “Miracle Whip brings the zing.” You can download the “Zingr” Facebook application, which lets you leave “zings” -- witty, flavorful comments -- on webpages.
There’s even a Miracle Whip “Zinglossary,” which features entries like “Zingle” (someone who has not yet found a companion to zing with) and “Zingbreaker” (the first zing that gets the entire dialogue of zings going).
They also invite you to add your own Miracle Whip words. Among the most recent additions, from a Facebook user named Karen: “Lardass: n. Someone who eats Miracle Whip.” Oops.
As you might expect, Miracle Whip earned a lot of mockery for this effort, a great deal of it in the comments section on their own YouTube videos. But one of the most devastating smackdowns came from Comedy Central’s faux pundit Stephen Colbert on the Oct. 15 episode of The Colbert Report:
Now, upon seeing this, a lesser marketing team would pop the corks on the champagne bottles and call it a day; a prominent shout-out on a well-regarded show that’s popular among the demographic you’re targeting is an advertiser’s dream -- even if the host of said show ends the shout-out with, “Guess what? Fuck you.”
But not the Miracle Whip team. Just under a month later on Nov. 12, they took out full-page ads (JPEG, PDF) in a handful of newspapers across the country to respond to the attack, claiming that, in the mayonnaise vs. Miracle Whip war, Colbert’s chosen the wrong side (“Like the Plantagenets in the Hundred Years’ War. Or whichever one was the cat in ‘Tom and Jerry’”).
But best of all, Miracle Whip chose to run ads in each of the three commercial breaks in that evening’s Report. And it was good:
Yes, it’s the same video. But the switched-out voiceover turns the ad into self-aware parody, almost like a self-MSTing.
When one ad says, “Now here are some cool people dancing,” it’s an admission that these people are not, in fact, cool. When another ad says, “You can’t quiet us… unlike the ‘T’ in ‘Colbert,’” it’s recognition that, no, there’s nothing revolutionary about using Miracle Whip.
And when the voiceover invites Colbert to join the other side by asking, “Come on, Stephen, doesn’t this roof look fun?” complete with an on-screen graphic of the word “fun” -- that’s Miracle Whip saying, we know we’re kind of lame. And while their roof doesn’t look fun, a company being self-deprecating and creative does.
Miracle Whip’s marketing conundrum is a common one: How do you market to young people? The trouble with that question is that it assumes that “young people” are monolithic, and that’s why most answers to the question are flawed: Let’s create a Facebook profile! Throw in some indie music in the background! Get some pretty people dancing! And tweet like we’ve never tweeted before!
The truth is, young people are not monolithic: not all of us have Facebook or Twitter accounts, we all have different taste in music, and everybody has different ideas of what makes someone cute. (I’ll go on record: I think Ellen Page is an order of magnitude more attractive than Megan Fox. Just sayin’.)
Trying to market to some nebulous concept of “young people” either means playing to some very eye-rolling stereotypes (yes, you, Miracle Whip) or trying to be all things to all people (which usually results in being nothing to everyone).
There’s no magical solution when marketing to our -- or really, any -- generation, and trying to find one almost always comes across as condescending. But being clever, being able to take a joke, and being a little self-deprecatingly dorky -- those are probably good starts.
