Miracle Whip is a product with troubles. It tastes weird. Always has. It ain’t Hellman’s Mayo. BUT — if you are the agency charged with working on it…WHO CARES??? You have a job to do. Make this stuff palatable, at least in the mind. And whoever is working for it is doing a pretty darn nice job — especially in the much maligned medium of radio. They are breaking some new ground using a kind of wry, kind of Patton Oswalt/This American Life humor approach. Dry. Deadpan. Channeling a sort of Gen X person having an imagined dialogue with some French Fries. Very engaging — and even more delightful for me, well cast, well written. And then they top it with a refreshing line, “From the Twisted Minds of Miracle Whip.” I like. It is twisted. And since they acknowledge it, I might accept that it is a funky tasting alternative to Mayo. So I go to their website, to see if the fun continues there — AND IT DOESN’T!! It looks like a corporate site!! It links to a Facebook page (of course!) that has some kind of unconnected video. I’m sorry, I don’t have the time!!! And worst of all, IT HAS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT TAG LINE. “Keep and Open Mouth.” Not a bad line. But why two of them??? I am confused, as a consumer. And as someone far smarter than me once said, “people don’t study your ads.” So, you do all this good positioning and creative work, and then you shoot yourself in the foot???
Oh well, half-right (or should I say half-write) is better than nothing.
Or is it???