Hasta La Creative!

Ever hear of Kalles Kaviar? It’s cod roe, and you eat it out of a toothpaste tube.

Cringe away, but Kalles is a beloved Swedish product. They put it over eggs and eat it on toast. It’s basically Sweden’s Marmite. To drive sales, parent company Orkla tapped Forsman & Bodenfors to produce a self-deprecating campaign. For the last year, Kalles has been traveling the world, seeking to initiate others—unsuccessfully, to put it mildly—in the Swedish taste of home.

The first ad takes place in Los Angeles and sets the tone. An earnest sampler with a pillowy-soft, Swedish-accented voice, perched in the one shadow on a well-lit boardwalk, shyly stops random strangers to offer them seasoned Kalles on slices of bread. People are eager to give it a go. It’s an open-minded crowd. But the reactions come fast and hard.

“This is not food,” one victim exclaims with a certainty usually reserved for proclamations of love or long-awaited deaths. After taking a reaming all day, our unlucky sampler reclines on the beach at sundown to enjoy his slices of the motherland in peace.

Our favorite is probably “Kalles in Tokyo.” The Japanese, they’re so polite! They leap in for the kill, and you can literally see their faces transform in horror as their mouths close. In a key moment, the sampler asks a still-chewing (and evidently disgusted) woman, “Do you like it?” She covers her mouth, nods politely, and backs away—slowly, like you would if you suddenly found yourself face to face with a bear.

The self-deprecating work plays on the cottage food-challenge trend. Kalles itself has starred in many. Two years ago, Maker Studios’ Morfar ate a whole tube over the course of nearly 10 minutes, and after a few unsettling dry-heaves, he cuts the video off—ostensibly to vomit in private. In another stunt, vlogger Big Steve from England tried getting locals to let him squeeze a hefty portion of Kalles in their mouths. The video is called “EATING THE WORST FOOD IN THE WORLD! (KALLES CAVIAR)”.

The genius of the campaign lies how it magnifies those chimes of universal disgust to bolster Swedish pride. (The ads are airing in Sweden, where there’s no need to win people over to the stuff.) Look at the beatific faces of those samplers when they’re finally done for the day. Hours of rejection can’t shake their love for the salty pink goo, because in the end, it’s a little squirt from home. (This kind of nationalism, evoked by acquired tastes, has made for good ads before—notably’s Pizza Hut Australia’s punking of backpackers with a Vegemite-crust pizza. Plus, there’s inherent value in saying your product isn’t for everyone—as Laphroaig scotch has realized lately.)

We’ve all got a Kalles, right? The Aussies have Vegemite. The Brits have Marmite. And Americans have peanut butter. Sweet, sweet peanut butter. You won’t know how much you love it—and how singular and alienating that love is—until you’re living elsewhere. Say, France. And when we spread our respectively weird creams over a bland carb, wherever we are in the world, they bring us back to a place we understand intuitively.

A few other Kalles ads appear below. In the most recent variant (at the very bottom), Kalles visits New York, and the first person to approach the kiosk is a black dude with hipster glasses and a Yankees cap. This time the response is surprisingly different. On the other side of the world, the brand finally finds its people.

A children’s helpline in Sweden just released an upsetting set of emojis showing kids being physically and verbal abused—in the hope that young victims of violence might use them to communicate their situation when words fail.

“A complex reality demands a complex set of symbols,” says the nonprofit group, BRIS, which helps at-risk children and teenagers. “The Abused Emojis make it possible for kids and young people to talk about situations where they felt bad or wrongly treated without having to put words on the situation. If you or somebody you know have been hurt, mistreated or feel sad, Abused Emojis makes it easier to talk about.”

Among the images are kids with bruises and cuts; a baby being struck; a child thinking about a skull (suicide); images of parents drinking; and a literal shithead (a boy who’s presumably having thoughts of being ugly or worthless).

It’s pretty fascinating and bleak. Would kids really use something like this?

Full set of images below.
 

The hills are alive with the sound of Unicef Sweden singing about cholera.

A jolly grim reaper does a Broadway number on waterborne diseases in Forsman & Bodenfors’ insane new ad from the children’s charity. Titled “The sound of Death,” it parodies The Sound of Music—namely the song “My Favorite Things,” performed by children in the musical. But instead of whiskers on kittens and brown paper packages tied up with string, it turns out that Death loves dysentery and leptospirosis.

The clip is firmly in the Mel Brooks tradition of dark comedy (Think “The Spanish Inquisition” from History of the World, Part I, or maybe more appropriate, the Nazi-themed “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers). And any macabre, musical PSA these days is likely to evoke, however slightly, “Dumb Ways to Die.”

Frankly, the lyrics could be better. And the extra wry approach makes the concept tough to swallow, but that’s kind of its point. It doesn’t quite trivialize the horrors it’s trying to address, it just pretends to do so, as a way to guilt viewers—essentially saying, “Enjoy this silly song … about the thousands of kids dying every day.” Whether that’s an effective call to action, who knows? It’s certainly memorable.

And at least it keeps up musical theater’s raison d’etre of having people burst into song about everything, all the time, even when it’s totally inappropriate.

Taco Bell is calling McDonald’s a disgusting communist pig, but McDonald’s doesn’t care, because McDonald’s still has the Big Mac. And now, the Big Mac is getting its very first lifestyle collection of merchandise for those who want something a little more meaty than what Martha Stewart can deliver.

The collection—which includes everything from clothing to wallpaper to bed sheets, all emblazoned with images of the chain’s signature sandwich—was launched Tuesday at a “McWalk” fashion show in Stockholm, Sweden. (It follows the success of Big Mac thermal underwear—at the time, a one-off product that McDonald’s Sweden made as part of its sponsorship of the Swedish Alpine and Cross Country Ski Team.)

If you’re so inclined, you can order this stuff at bigmacshop.se.

While not an April Fools joke (you’ll have to wait until next Wednesday for those), this stunt was part of a global day of McDonald’s hijinks that took place Tuesday. Called imlovinit24, it featured goofy antics from McDonald’s marketing teams in 24 cities worldwide in 24 hours.

Among the other highlights: a coffee-cup-shaped ball pit in Sydney, Australia; a giant Big Mac jigsaw puzzle in Madrid, Spain; a Joy Maze in Bucharest, Romania; a McOrchestra in Vienna; and a Ne-Yo concert in Los Angeles.