Tetherd Cow Ahead

Well, dear Acowlytes, as promised a post or two back I[tippy title=”*”]Actually, Violet Towne did the acquiring…[/tippy] acquired over the weekend a jar of the new Kraft product provisionally known as ‘Name Me’, in order that I could taste-test and review it for you in time for the launch of the official moniker next Monday.

As you can see, it comes in a jar that is similar to Vegemite, and sports the Vegemite logo. On opening, the main thing I noticed is that, unlike regular Vegemite, this is a vacuum-sealed product. As all Australians know, after you open a bottle of normal Vegemite it will keep pretty much forever in the cupboard without any fear that it will either go off or get eaten by bugs. Vegemite is one of the incorruptibles.

Not so with ‘Name Me’. It needs to be kept refrigerated and is ‘best consumed within 4 weeks of opening’ – a legacy of the cheese base, I guess.

The most disconcerting thing about the new Vegemite product is the appearance. It looks exactly like melted chocolate or Nutella. I can already see this as the basis for numerous schoolyard practical jokes and school lunch tragedies. Not to be daunted, and mindful of my service to The Cow, I spread some on a piece of crusty bread and gave it a go.

The bottom line is that it’s not that bad. It tastes more of plain ol’ Vegemite than anything else – just as if you’d put a bit of actual Vegemite on some very buttery bread. I was happy to eat it, and the whole jar will no doubt get consumed in due course. The real sticking point for me as a potential customer, and the hurdle that I think Kraft has to jump, is that I don’t really see the point. It doesn’t offer anything that I wouldn’t get with my usual Vegemite hit, but it has the drawback of needing to be kept in the fridge, and looking like it should taste sweet and chocolatey. It is the Paris Hilton of toast toppings; it is all appearance and no substance. Its reason for existence is completely questionable.

Add that to the fact that we already have a number of products that more than fill the salty yeast-extract niche, and my projection is that in a year or two’s time ‘Name Me’ will be nothing more than an evolutionary dead end in the taxonomic record of breakfast comestibles.

Anyway, come Monday ‘Name Me’ will actually have a name, and that should be entertaining. I’m sure that Kraft is desperately hoping that, like the competition run for the name of the original Vegemite back in 1922, it will whip up a truckload of consumer interest and go on to make them megabucks. I predict that they won’t have the gumption to stick out ten or more years though – the period of time over which Vegemite languished until it finally took off in the late 1930s. I bet they won’t have the guts to pick the name out of a hat, either, like they did with the Vegemite name competition. That would be anathema to the control-freak culture of modern advertising.

If they did have a hat it would have to be a big one though, and these are some of the names that would be in it – a random selection from over 13,000 suggestions on the ‘Name Me’ site – along with my estimations of their likely success:

•Cheese Plus (Too much like Cheese Pus)
•SpreadEzy (Yawn)
•Super-fun-mite (What?)
•AusCream (Eww)
•Creamdelight (Double Eww)
•Vethen (Vethen? What are you smoking?)
•Score!!! (So you got some of what they’re smoking too…!)
•YamYam (No No)
•Lunch Mate (Snore)
•Sloppymite (You’ve never worked in advertising, have you?)
•VevletMite (And you never finished school, did you?)
•I LOVE IT! (OK, calm down. I’m sure you do, but we’re looking for a name here…)
•Stampede! (Oh – on account of the sloppy brown appearance? I think not)
•Hero (No – we don’t need another one)
•Grail (Steady on there Crusader! Don’t overreach)
•Downunder (Er… again, not good connotations, given the appearance)
•Chanuw (That thing’s a keyboard – you’re not meant to hammer it randomly with your fists…)
•Moorishmite (Did you really mean to spell it like that?)
•DivinityVegiDip (Yup – that really rolls off the tongue)
•Magic Mono (You’re not supposed to inject the stuff, pal…)

Someone stop me! 13,000 of the damn things! I’m beginning to see the kind of daunting task that Mr Kraft and his troops face! Stay tuned to The Cow for the real name when they announce it. It can’t be worse than any of these.

Can it?

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*Actually, Violet Towne did the acquiring…

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A few nights ago I had one of those weird dreams that includes particular moments that are vividly memorable on waking. In this one, I dreamed that I had the number 17051 tattooed on my left hand, near the knuckle of my forefinger. In the dream, I had never noticed the number there before. This is the kind of thing that happens in dreams, although as you might remember there have been happenstances in my waking life where I’ve noticed for the first time something almost as unsettling on my hand.

This number’s main claim to fame appears to be that it is the zip code for Pennsylvania – a fact of which I had no previous (conscious) knowledge. It is also the ChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) number of fluoride and the number of a main belt asteroid called Oflynn. It isn’t even a date or a prime number, which is quite disappointing.

I’m particularly interested in unusual words or word combinations and odd numbers that appear in dreams. Yours?

Because we’ve ventured back onto the topic of Bonox, it occurred to me that many of you across the various ponds may be interested in the most recent news from Bonox’s creators, Kraft, who I’m sure you will know better for their much more famous product Vegemite (we’ve discussed it before here).

Vegemite has been around in Australia since 1922, and has remained virtually unchanged. A year or so back, though, Kraft did a survey on their website to find out what Australians ‘wanted’ in their Vegemite, quite obviously with an eye to boosting the sales of their atramentous spread. This notion that you can somehow ‘improve’ an already perfectly acceptable product, is, it has to be said, a quintessentially American one. Australians don’t tend to think like that.[tippy title=”†”]Well, Australians who don’t subscribe to nutty ever-accelerating economic models, anyway.[/tippy] So it will come as no surprise to you at all to know that Vegemite is now 100% American-owned. Like most of the rest of Australia. But I digress. Vegemite occupies that most privileged of positions on the supermarket shelf, alongside strawberry jam and peanut butter; it is what it is, and trying to make it into something else ‘more successful’ is really only the kind of fluffy dream that fills the restless sleep of advertising people.[tippy title=”‡”]Yeah, I know what you’re going to say – peanut butter comes in crunchy and smooth, but I really don’t want to contemplate a crunchy Vegemite.[/tippy]

Anyhoo, Kraft got all kinds of suggestions about how Vegemite could be improved – there was a website you could visit and put in your threepence-worth about how you’d like to see it combined with muesli or salmon paste or whatnot. There were a lot of rather nauseating suggestions and I speculate that Kraft neglected to understand that they were not really seeing a proper representation of the Vegemite-buying public, but rather a whole bunch of people who evidently thought it had some kind of defect (although there were some like me who visited the site and left comments to the effect that they should simply leave it alone). As it turns out this led, eventually, to the announcement of a wonderful new product which has been sitting on supermarket shelves for the past few months sporting the moniker ‘Name Me’. Yes, that’s right, in a transparently sad grab for publicity, the people who run Kraft’s advertising campaign have attempted to rope in the hoardes of loyal Happy Little Vegemites to come up with a name for the new stuff.

This is not the first time that Kraft have tried to spin Vegemite off into something else. You’d have thought they’d have learnt their lesson about fiddling with an iconic cultural lynchpin after their merger of Vegemite and cheese in the 1990s failed to gain traction in the world of toast-topping comestibles.

But no. Now they’re doing pretty much the same thing again – this time it’s Vegemite and cream cheese. And, my prediction is that it will follow the same ignominious trajectory of the 1990s effort, particularly in light of what I’m now about to tell you.

You will have noticed that I haven’t linked to anything Vegemite so far in this post. And it’s not going to happen. Because, when I was doing a bit of legwork for y’all to read about the grand Vegemite saga, I came across this incredible disclaimer on the Vegemite website:

All other use, copying or reproduction of any part of this Site is prohibited (save to the extent permitted by law). Without limiting the foregoing, no part of this Site may be reproduced on any other internet site, and you are not authorised to redistribute or sell the material or reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise convert it to any other form that people can use. You are also prohibited from linking the Site to another website in any way whatsoever (emphasis mine).

Putting it succinctly, Kraft expressly forbids you to link to the ‘new Vegemite’ site!

There are few things quite so sad as business people who just completely fail to grok the zeitgeist. I can’t say whether it’s Kraft or their advertising agency who has prompted the instigation of Vegemite v.2 and this harebrained web campaign, but I know where I’d put my money. Mr Kraft, if you’re reading this, sack those goobers. NO-ONE in this early part of the 21st century makes a website that you are not allowed to link to and protects it with a legal rider! That’s the internet equivalent of building your retail outlet in Upper Siberia and then posting security guards with tasers at the front door just in case anyone does find you.

I can only surmise that Kraft is so nervous about their new product that they really don’t want to attract attention to it. Either that or they have arrived at the quite unbalanced conviction that someone might want to steal the idea. Really, I can’t think of one single sensible explanation for why you’d want to prevent people from wording up your spread. Or spreading your word.

I haven’t tried the new ‘Vegemite’ and I had no real intention of doing so. I like Vegemite just as it is, and I miss it if I can’t get it (like when I visit… well… anywhere…). But as you know I will pull out all the stops in the service of science, so I make a pledge to you Acowlytes – this weekend I will throw off my cultural preconceptions and try the new ‘Name Me’. This will allow me to post an appropriate food review to coincide with Kraft’s Grand Reveal of the new name on September 21.

I’d link you to where you can find out all about that, but hey – my hands are tied.

ADDENDUM: It’s been pointed out that the legal rider on the Vegemite site is probably intended to stop users in the Vegemite ‘community’ from posting links from inside the forums to other places. If this indeed the case, for a legal document it’s sloppily ambiguous (viz: ‘in any way whatsoever’), still dopey and in all likelihood just as unenforceable. And it’s madness that you are compelled to agree (via an irksome and irritatingly flakey Flash crawler) to a set of legal requirements before you can even read the ‘No Name’ site – something pretty much unparalleled on any commercial site I’ve ever visited, and again vividly demonstrating Kraft’s lack of web acumen.

ADDENDUM #2: The Flash User Agreement has now vanished from the Vegemite site. Obviously its ridiculous nature has been pointed out to someone. The site still retains all the conditions in its Terms of Use though, so nothing has really changed, other than that you’re not forced to agree to them before you can view anything.

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†Well, Australians who don’t subscribe to nutty ever-accelerating economic models, anyway.

‡Yeah, I know what you’re going to say – peanut butter comes in crunchy and smooth, but I really don’t want to contemplate a crunchy Vegemite.

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My new coffee cup (a NOT birthday present from Cissy Strutt), with my new favourite beverage (Hot NOT Bonox).

Every now and then Sister Veronica gets a letter like this one that she received last week:

Dear Sister Veronica,

Can you believe it has been 3 years and 1 day since your last (and, ironically, first) “Dear Sister Veronica” bit at the Cow? I’ve been sipping Rasputin beer and talking about you with my pal, Joey. And we’re both wondering how’s come you haven’t been seen at the Reverend’s in a while, and more importantly, how come you haven’t show us your magnificent udders yet? Neither of us is good with astrology, but both of us agree that a peep show is DEFINITELY in the cards.

Your Biggest Fans,

Atlas C. and Joey P.

Mostly she just rolls her eyes and resumes application of nail polish to her toes, but this time she pointed out that (speaking of ‘things on the cards’) we never did revisit the predictions she made in 2007 for major events of that year. And dammit, it looks like she’s right! Somehow I completely overlooked my promise to see just how well she did with her clairvoyant powers. If you don’t recall her forecasts (such as an earthquake in Peru and the winner of the 2007 Academy Awards) you can refresh your memory here.

Looking back at 2007 it seems that Sister Veronica’s crystal ball is sporting an astonishing 100% success rate. If you want to check her accuracy, Wikipedia lists some of the important events of 2007 here. Sister V managed to score an incredible five direct hits out of five specific predictions WELL BEFORE THEY HAPPENED!! (plus she made two bonus predictions for 2008 which I think you’ll agree are more than a little uncanny!) Sylvia Browne, it’s time for you to hang up your hat and call it a day.

Now that’s what we call persuasive evidence of psychic ability!

The Continuing Misfortunes of Simple Graphics Man ~

#36: The Mediocre Manifesto.

Simple Graphics Man gets called on to tout Microsoft’s new corporate slogan.

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Thanks again to Atlas for this latest SGM sighting.

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