Tetherd Cow Ahead

Excellent! A new magical potion has appeared on the supermarket shelves. Harry Potter eat yer heart out! This particular version is called ‘Nutrient Water’ and their marketing department has been pulling out all the stops with this one. Here’s what you get if you choose the ‘D-Stress’ flavour:

Remember what it was like to be a kid? One hour for finger painting, two hours for hide-n-seek, naps in the morning, naps in the afternoon, naps in general. Life as a grown up of course is a little more complex. Play-time is now work time, home-time is over-time and free-time is pushed-for-time. That’s why we’ve packed D-Stress with Vitmain D and L-Tyrosine to help bring you back, get a grip and put it all in perspective. Think of it as a step back in time. Just without the hand-me-downs and times tables.

What kind of whacked, off-his/her-face imbecile wrote that heap of crap? So you drink this stuff and it will help you get a grip and put everything into perspective? Then I don’t think the copywriter even opened the bottle. He needs about another fifty gallons by my reckoning. But as laughable as all that is, you have to go for the ingredient list for the full guffaw:

Ingredients (nature approved) – deionised water, crystalline fructose, food acid, natural blackberry goji flavour, etc etc

That little snippet has got to be the biggest gob of codswallop that I’ve heard in years. Nature approved? What the fuck? How did ‘nature’ approve it? Just by it existing? My brain is making pinging noises. And then we have ‘deionised’ water. Let me ask you, dear Cowpokes: do you have any reason at all to suppose water is any better without ions? (What they mean is simply that the water has been filtered, but oh no, they can’t just call it ‘filtered water’ – who’d buy something like that?). And of course ‘crystalline fructose’ is just a form of corn syrup. They could have said ‘ultra sweet sugar’ but that sounds a little too much like a step back in time… And I really don’t even want to go into the whole stupid goji thing. ((Goji berries are the new wheatgrass. They’re supposed to cure everything from depression to cancer. A clinical study done in May 2008 and published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine indicated that parametric data, including body weight, did not show significant differences between subjects receiving Lycium barbarum berry (goji) juice and subjects receiving the placebo; the study concluded that ‘subjective (my italics) measures of health were improved’ and suggested further research in humans was necessary. That was all I could find of any value. That’s the BEST they’ve got. Paraphrasing – if you imagine hard enough, maybe you’ll feel better.))

I was interested in why they might stick L-tyrosine in this product though, so I did a little bit of research. ((This is so easy to do now, that my mind just explodes with frustration – why don’t people check this stuff out?)) L-tyrosine is an amino acid, and one of the building blocks of neurotransmitters. Most people get all they need from their diet, and you have to be pretty unhealthy to have a deficit of the stuff. ((It’s in so many foods that it would be hard to avoid, in fact. You can even get it from an average McDonald’s meal.)) Not only that, you shouldn’t have too much of it, and several websites about nutritional supplements that I found have this kind of thing to say:

If you do not have any need to, you should not take L-tyrosine as supplements without consulting your doctor.

I figure that if they printed something like that on the label it would cause you to get a much better grip than all that other crud.

Still, at least this water has some active ingredients, even if they do have the potential to screw up your brain chemistry. Unlike some other waters we have visited.

He said what?

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Thanks to Atlas (who else?) for bringing this to the attention of The Cow.

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From today’s Sydney Morning Herald:

Faced with the overwhelming rejection of iSnack 2.0, Kraft has done an about-turn and ditched the name of its new Vegemite cream cheese blend.

I have to defer to Ben (comments on this post) and admit that it does have the whiff of an advertising hoax, despite Kraft’s protestations to the contrary:

The new name has simply not resonated with Australians. Particularly the modern technical aspects associated with it ~ Simon Talbot, company spokesman.

But as I see it, if it is a publicity stunt, then the po-faced attitude from Kraft is baffling. Talbot also stated:

At no point in time has the new Vegemite name been about initiating a media publicity stunt. We are proud custodians of Vegemite, and have always been aware that it is the people’s brand and a national icon.

Ben would undoubtedly say this is some kind of clever misdirection, but in my opinion, that kind of ploy can only work if the intended victims feel like they’ve been outfoxed or are amused. Since neither of these cards seem to be in play, all that’s left is bewilderment. Are they trying to cover their asses because it’s a crap joke that backfired? Are they sincere? Are they afraid that they’ve been caught cynically exploiting a loyal legion of fans? Is it all an attempt to spin out the publicity a little more?

Who knows? In the end, all that Kraft and their advertisers have done is to attract attention to a concoction of dubious desirability, and to confuse everyone. The Product Formerly Known As iSnack 2.0 will ultimately live or die on its market appeal, not on an advertising campaign. Since I believe it’s a poorly conceived grab at expanding market share by trading off the back of a cultural icon, my money is on die.

Good iMorning iCowpokes!

Well, down here in sunny ((That’s sarcasm, in case anyone missed it.)) iMelbourne we have just survived the insanity that is iGrand iFinal iFootball whereat the official name for the new Vegemite product (formerly known as ‘Name Me’) was kicked off. And as promised, the iCow is bringing the new name to you hot off the iPress.

I know what you’re thinking – that image above is a cheeky Photoshopped pisstake of the actual name which I’m going to reveal to you in due course…

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Was that long enough for the cold reality sink in? Yes dear iFriends, the people at iKraft, demonstrating a dorkiness that transcends anything I thought was even possible, have climbed on the iBandwagon and, in some kind of bizarre and incomprehensible grab for what we can only assume to be their concept of coolness, named their product iSnack 2.0. It’s worse than I could possibly have imagined. And I can imagine pretty bad possibilities.

How many kinds of wrong can be encapsulated here? The whole ‘i’ phenomenon has become so hackneyed and feeble that it’s really only Apple that can carry it off in any way, and that’s solely because it’s their heritage. Aside from anything, the ‘i’ was originally intended to designate ‘internet’ and if there’s one thing that Kraft and Vegemite has demonstrated extremely clearly, it’s their complete lack of intertubes acumen. Further to this, as if to underline their credentials as people who have totally missed the boat, they’ve appended the meaningless (but OH so hip…) ‘2.0’ to the name – if anything it would be Vegemite 2.0, not iSnack 2.0, which by any proper reckoning has just come out of beta and is in v.1.0.

What were they thinking?

King Willy points me to a site where ‘Melbourne’ ex-smoker and mom ‘Rachel Bell’ on her ‘A Mom’s blog about beauty, cosmetics & staying young’ tells us of a wonderful new discovery that has totally changed her life!

My name is Rachel Bell. I live in Melbourne, 07 (sic) and I want to tell you how I changed my teeth from being something I was ashamed of to being something I’m proud to show off. This teeth whitening trick changed my life and I hope it can change yours too. I’m not a dentist, doctor or medical expert, I’m just a mom[tippy title=”*”]If you really want us to believe she lives in Melbourne you stupid twats, then you’d best do some homework and find out that no-one in Australia spells it like that…[/tippy] who stumbled upon a special combination of two different products that work wonders when put together. This is my story.

This is Rachel:

Isn’t she wholesome-looking? Such a lovely honest girl. This is what Rachel’s teeth looked like before the astonishing teeth-whitening process:

And this is what they looked like after.

Yes, Cowpokes, the two amazing products that Rachel has discovered for whitening her teeth are called a computer and Photoshop!

I’d like to find out more about Rachel, and maybe get a few more of tips for staying young and looking beautiful, but golly, it looks like she’s only made one post on her ‘blog’. And, sadly, the comments to it are closed ‘due to spam’.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t link to it. I think Rachel probably already gets an ample quotient of visitors.

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*If you really want us to believe she lives in Melbourne you stupid twats, then you’d best do some homework and find out that no-one in Australia spells it like that…

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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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