By Marc Jampole
While OpEdge is on a
two-week hiatus, we are running some of the more evergreen columns from past
years. This blog entry originally appeared on April 8, 2010.
My entry into frozen food giant Stouffer’s “Let’s Fix Dinner” marketing campaign came
via a two-page, full-color ad in AARP Magazine, the bimonthly slick
lifestyle magazine of the American Association of Retired People, which claims
to have the largest circulation of any magazine in the entire world. So before taking a look at why "Let's Fix Dinner" is a prime example of the commercialization of
relationships in contemporary society, I want to first describe the ad, which
is the sizzle to the sizzle, that is, the whistle-buzzer that makes us notice
the twisted messaging that is supposed to entice us to buy the product.
The right page of this two-page ad is a sexy pose of an
overweight couple in their 40s, fully dressed in front of an abstract
aquamarine background, but looking like they’re about to take off their clothes
and do it, except she’s wearing an oven mitt.
The “VH1 pop-up video” style headline is “Are oven mitts the key to a
successful relationship?” followed by a smaller headline in another typeface
and different pop-up balloon, “Dinner is a great time for couples to reconnect,
and catch up with each other face to face.”
At the bottom of the page is a short paragraph that starts “Amazing the
difference a real meal can make,” then proceeds to sell Stouffer’s frozen “Mac
& Cheese.” The most striking thing
about the ad is the carnality in the expressions of these two truly chunky
people.
In the left hand ad, Stouffer’s takes a more conventional
approach to advertising prepared food:
It’s a very copy-heavy ad with a photo in the top third of another
middle-aged couple—very fit, light-skinned African-Americans—in the kitchen
embracing while she handles pair of tongs.
The rest of the ad is brimming with words, including four paragraphs
about the four steps to connecting with your partner. Here are the headlines for each step:
- Slow down to reconnect
- Make conversation
- Keep it simple, sweetheart
- Join the Stouffer’s challenge
“Keep it simple,” of course, means buy Stouffer’s “solutions
for delicious, nutritious meals without the fuss.” The challenge is to make a personal
commitment to have dinner with your spouse more often. For help in meeting this commitment, Stouffer’s
sends you to www.letsfixdinner.com. This left-side full-page ad also crowds in
small photos of the frozen lasagna and the ever-popular, ever-chic macaroni
& cheese. As the ad says, “Add a
little candlelight and you’ve got a romantic meal for two.”
While the two-page ad focuses on the romantic needs of the
empty-nester, the website really is for families with children. It is a very infotaining website, i.e., it mixes information and entertainment
in a light-hearted, happy kind of way.
Among the whistles and buzzers are pages of factoids; features on real
families in a kind of “reality” webcasting; a survey to take; and of course
product information. There is also a
page to sign-up for the Stouffer’s “Let’s Fix Dinner” Challenge. Once you’re signed up, you get points and
entries into a sweepstakes every time you record another dinner that the entire
family had together. Last time I was on
the website, it stated on the homepage that people in the challenge have
reported making 98,974 family dinners.
The home page is very easy on the eyes: the centerpiece is a rotating wide-screen box
that consists of a happy image of a family or family member and three pop-up
balloons, in which there are three pieces of highly structured copy, as we will
see in this example:
- Balloon #1/A provocative statement: “Can placemats keep your kids off drugs?”
- Balloon #2/A factoid: “Studies show that teens in families that have dinner together five times a week are 45% less likely to drink and 66% less likely to take drugs.”
- Balloon #3/A squib of real-life conversation from one of the “real” families featured on the website: “‘Okay, I’m resolving to clear all my stuff off the dining room table so we can actually use it!’ Sarah, San Diego, CA”
There are five of these billboards that rotate onto the home
page, one after the other. Four of them focus on families with children. The empty nester one features a photo of the
chubby but horny couple from the AARP
Magazine ad.
Stouffer’s and its advertising mavens and mavessess put a
lot of work into creating a marketing campaign and website in which every
detail down to the last factoid and image focuses on making the message.
And what’s the message?
That Stouffer’s frozen dinners are delicious? No.
That Stouffer’s meals are nutritious? No.
That these food products can contribute to a healthy
weight-loss program? No.
That Stouffer’s gives you a way to feed a family cheaply? Again,
no.
That Stouffer’s is a fast way to chow down? Not exactly.
No, in fact, the central message is not about food at
all. It’s about the benefits of the
family eating dinner together (something that my always busy family did about
six nights a week, both when I was a child and a father). The way that Stouffer’s facilitates this
togetherness is pretty much unexplained.
It’s taken for granted that the post-modern 21st century consumer knows
the product-related benefits of frozen dinners, (which in the old days used to
be called TV dinners because they were used to bring the family together for
the Ed Sullivan and Dinah Shore shows).
Once again, the U.S. people face an urgent social
problem, or in this case a knot of related social problems that include the
transmission of basic middle class values, school performance, teenaged
substance abuse and conjugal sex. And
once again, U.S.
industry and commerce come up with an answer.
And it’s always the same answer: Buy something.
Beneath Stouffer’s sophisticated attempt to attach the
values of family life and interfamilial relationships to its frozen dinners is
the basic ideological subtext that a commercial transaction will solve your
problem, whatever it is. And it’s so
simple! You don’t have to spend any time
together chopping meat or sautéing vegetables.
No need to even boil water. Just
pop it in the microwave and serve, with candles or hip-hop music or maybe
both.
And therein lies the significance of featuring macaroni and
cheese so prominently. Mac & cheese
represents the epitome of comfort food that makes us feel nice and warm inside
about family life. It is also about the
easiest meal there is to make from scratch. But it does require boiling water, chopping
cheese and measuring out some milk. And
those things can be great distractions when you’re trying to work on a family
relationship. But Stouffer’s makes it
even easier than making mac & cheese from scratch. All you do is pop it in the microwave. And now you’ve got food preparation out of
the way, that’s the hard part. The rest
of building strong family relationships will be easy, because you’ve done all
the hard work already – you’ve bought something.
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