Marketing Carrots as Junk Food? Sounds Like Junk Marketing.

So a bunch of carrot farmers get together and decide to launch a $25 million ad campaign to make packaged baby carrots cool for teens. Sounds about right to me.

And here's the strategy: Position and market packaged baby carrots as a kind of junk food. According to the NPR report I heard and read, the marketing concept is to "colonize kids' brains with the idea that baby carrots are extreme and that the crunch is really awesome."

And according to the marketing expert at the agency behind the campaign, "it is a satire on [ads for Doritos and Mountain Dew]. It's like junk food advertising is a bit ridiculous, so let's have fun with it."

Okay, so I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that this is an idiotic idea, the likes of which Wile E. Coyote might conjure up to catch a roadrunner. I am not saying it won't work. I am saying I see no foundation for investing $25 million into what appears to be an Acme-approved concept. I mean why not just paint anvils orange and drop them off cliffs onto unsuspecting teenagers' heads?

According to the story, "The carrot campaign also has a strategy to get bags of baby carrots into teenagers' hands easily via school vending machines." Seriously, these farmers are investing $25 million to promote carrots like junk food and put them into the junk food distribution stream via vending machines.

I just got one thing left to say about this: "What an embezzle! What an ultramaroon!"