Ordinary Advertising

It probably seems like I single out the advertising done by Kraft Foods for more than its fair share of obloquy. And that may, in fact, be statistically true. But it’s not because I have any sort of vendetta going with those well-meaning folks out in Northbrook. I’m just more intimately familiar with the addle-pated ways they go about developing advertising. And have been given to understand, their methodologies differ very little from those employed by most of the other major packaged goods, (car, cosmetics, financial institutions, retailers, consumer goods, liquor et cetera, ad nauseum) advertisers around the country.

Which is how we end up with ads like this one. A tragi-comical example of ordinary, or maybe worse, advertising that by sheer coincidence happened to run about a month before The Wall Street Journal published its annual “Survey of CEO Compensation” wherein it was revealed that by virtue of her current occupancy of the catbird seat at Kraft, Irene Rosenfeld was blessed with emoluments including $1.375MM in annual salary, $2.625MM in annual incentives, $1.779MM in stock option grants, $5MM in restricted stock grants and $6.416MM in cash, performance-based grants for a grand total of $17.196MM in total direct compensation while she and her marketing minions managed to eke out a Total Shareholder Return for the year of -5.7%. Nice work, if you can get it, as the saying goes.

And this is hardly the only example of Kraft manifesting its uncanny ability to plumb the abysms of advertising. Over just the last few months, I’ve also collected this wordplay, for California Pizza Kitchen. A somewhat expensive, but quite good product married to a headline whose sophistication is on a par with a joke one might hear during 3rd grade recess.

Then, there’s the old “people view deli as being the gold standard, so let’s find a clever way to draw a parallel between our pegboard and well products and their deli counterparts!” strategy, the last vestige of marketing scoundrels who having just emerged from several weeks in focus groups and laboring under M&M-induced, sugar comas honestly believe the 48 some-odd (mostly odd, if you ask me) people who told them Kraft’s products are just as good as the products they typically stand in line 20 minutes and pay twice the price for, so wouldn’t “good as the deli” be not only a powerful USP, but a BFD to boot?

The mind reels. Only to be rotated faster by this Velveeta ad which reminds me of the somewhat talentless art director I once knew who survived almost exclusively by recycling his swipe file of old ads having determined that the kitsch appeal of graphic tropes and techniques from yesteryear would adequately disguise the fact that there wasn’t an original idea in sight.

Which brings me to this final ad for Minute Rice that I actually thought was quite engaging. Too venturesome to have come from Kraft. And, of course, it didn’t. It came from the people Kraft sold Minute Rice to a while back. A move they are planning to repeat with Post cereals when that sale to Ralcorp closes in mid-2008. (So we can hope for better ads than the above soon.) And one they might want to consider with a lot of their other brands. Because, as one of their senior marketing managers once told me, sotto voce, they are “outstanding financial stewards and mediocre marketers.”

All of which would help explain why Warren Buffett took such an enormous plunge on KFT a short time ago. First off, he has the investment horizon of Job. But more importantly, he may have spotted that whereas Kraft as a marketer is a big fat zero, Kraft as a hedge fund of brands just begging to be spun off and advertised with some degree of distinction, could be a gold mine (for someone besides the CEO).