Gonna be honest with you guys in a TMI sort of way: we just don’t get the sexualized food thing. Sure, George Costanza in bed with a pastrami sandwich was a great joke. But when we’re eating mac and cheese we are only thinking of mac and cheese.
Anyway, you probably remember that Kraft-Heinz, the behemoth created by the merger of those two processed food giants, chose to review all of its agencies late last year. The winners of said review included CP+B, David, some other agencies and Publicis Seattle.
We weren’t really aware of the Publicis win, but then we also weren’t aware that K-H was going to launch a line of bro-friendly frozen meals called Devour. The first spots by the former promoting the latter launched this week.
Now, who might the target audience for these ads be? The hashtag for the first one is #FoodYouWantToFork, and it takes the Costanza/American Pie thing to its natural conclusion.
So that was intentionally awkward.
The next one dives into a different fantasy involving the pool boy and the lonely Real Housewife of Wherever the Fuck. (TV tells us that people have this fantasy. We do not know that to be true.)
It was a metaphor! The pool guy was eating his meal but also blanking his blank.
So this product is clearly for dudes between the ages of 18 and 35 and possibly older who want to prepare their meals with little fuss but aren’t up for eating Weight Watchers in public. As Devour’s brand manager Molly White put it in a release picked up by Meat + Poultry dot com, “Finally, there’s a product that gives people what they want: real taste to fulfill real cravings.”
We have cravings and we like things to happen quickly, but we would rather not resemble that dude in the first ad. Good thing he’s not acting aggressively sexual toward nearby women in a super weird way or anything like that.