Hasta La Creative!

You may have read about Victors & Spoils’ pro-bono (and, actually, fictional) campaign for broccoli in the New York Times, or possibly somewhere else around the Internet. The Havas-owned crowdsourcing agency, as you may know, have put together campaigns for Coca-Cola, Quiznos and General Mills over the years. So they know a thing or two about selling food products, although they normally deal with huge corporations selling hyper-processed foods rather than a vegetable. The interesting process they went through attempting to create a broccoli campaign is well-documented in video format over at The New York Times site and is well worth a gander.

Rhett and Link (Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal), whose IFC program Rhett & Link: Commercial Kings (in which they went around the country creating low budget ads for real, local companies) lasted one season, satirize the broccoli campaign in a new segment for their YouTube show, Good Mythical More. They created six fictional ads for the program. Unfortunately, while these ads themselves are pretty funny, the banter in between them drags the show out past the ten minute mark, and is significantly less worthwhile. So I’ve been a good sport and tracked down the start times for the six broccoli ads for you: 3:53, 4:42, 5:20, 6:09, 6:41, and 7:10.

The first of the broccoli spots plays on the superfood’s healthy aspect with the tagline “Be Old Longer,” since living longer essentially means being “old and crotchety” for a longer period of time. In the second spot, they channel a disgruntled father with the tagline “Broccoli: Quit your whining and eat it.”  One of the funnier ads is the “vintage” spot, selling broccoli as “the only vegetable with an afro.” Strictly speaking, this isn’t true, since cauliflower could also be said to have an afro. But that’s just nitpicking. The next spot advises you to “eat it raw, because it smells like a fart when you cook it.” My personal favorite tells you to eat broccoli “if you don’t want to feel guilty when your mother dies,” ending with the tagline, “Broccoli: Your dead mom would have wanted you to.” Using guilt to advertise broccoli? Pretty genius. The last of the spots is probably the goofiest: it runs around the idea that broccoli looks like little trees, which would make you a giant. Rhett and Link both take bites out of a piece of broccoli, pretending to be giants eating a tree. Silly stuff, indeed.

You might wonder if a satire of an already tongue-in-cheek fictional campaign was really necessary, but it’s all in good fun. And we could all use some fun on a Monday. Credits after the jump. continued…

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