Promotional pasta
We got a mysterious cardboard package in the post from The Guardian newspaper today. it looked a bit like an Amazon package, and we were trying to remember if either of us had ordered any books or CDs from the paper. On opening it up, were were amazed and baffled to find—-carefully shrouded in bubble wrap—-a sheet of lasagne (uncooked) printed with the following text:
THE ESSENTIAL ITALIAN INGREDIENT
The new book, River Café Two Easy20 pages of gourmet Italian recipes exclusively revealed this Saturday
The Guardian
And—-just in case any of the lucky recipients suddenly thought, “Oh, I’ll make a very minimalist lasagne tonight!”—-the bubble wrap was printed with the warning, “For promotional use only and strictly not for consumption”.
I’ll concede that it’s probably the most unusual junk mail I’ve ever received, but how much must it have cost to send carefully wrapped sheets of pasta out to thousands of households, not to mention the waste of cardboard, plastic and fuel? It was certainly unsolicited, unless we failed to uncheck an obscure box somewhere which read:
Please send me promotional but functionally useless Italian comestibles.
The world gets weirder by the day.
1
That sounds neat. Can you offer up a photo?----- As a functionally useful Italian comestible, I must object. Thanks for keeping us in the loop of the stranger side of Spam...or...Spaghetti as it were...
by Robert Simplicio @ 13/05/2005 5:06 pm • Permalink •
2
Iolaire McFadden: Your wish is my command: photo 1 and photo 2. It turned out to be quite difficult to do it justice.
Robert Simplicio:
See, I would have been really pleased if they'd sent edible lasagne sheets...
by bsag @ 13/05/2005 8:06 pm • Permalink •
3
That's crazy. Absolutely crazy. I love it.
by Math Ninja @ 13/05/2005 10:06 pm • Permalink •
4
Is this a rather repellent thing to do? Apart from all the usual puritan complaints about food wasted when there are millions starving etc etc, there's toxicity in that there ink, isn't there? Something about tainting perfectly good pasta sheets and then sticking them in the post, in bubble wrap is such conspicuous consumption, it has a yuk factor beyond its moral tastelessness, hasn't it?
Has the Grauniad readership written in to complain?
by brendadada @ 14/05/2005 1:06 am • Permalink •
5
That is so totally totally cool! When your unsolicited mail is actually blogged about by people, you must know that it is in some way effective (IMHO).
by Luke Randall @ 14/05/2005 9:05 am • Permalink •
6
Let's face it - that's some really effective marketing - and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the pasta wouldn't kill you if you ate it .
Wouldn't it be cool to write little poems on pasta sheets to be discovered as people ate their way through dinner!
by manichaen @ 14/05/2005 12:06 pm • Permalink •
7
I may be just a simple gardener but I know art when i see it. Frame it, hang it and be cooool!
by john(jc.) @ 14/05/2005 4:05 pm • Permalink •
8
To all: It was effective marketing in as far as I noticed it and wrote about it, but in my case, it was rather counter-productive. I was pretty irritated by the waste of resources that it involved (particularly coming from a paper that often has articles about ecological and conservation issues). As a result, I deliberately didn't buy that issue on principle, even though I would have enjoyed the recipe supplement.
As for framing it, I had to fish it out of the bin to take a photo of it! But it is now sitting propped up by the front door like a letter waiting to be posted. I might put it in an envelope and send it back to the Guardian, with a letter of complaint written on the back.
by bsag @ 15/05/2005 10:05 am • Permalink •
9
Just for a bit more bizarreness: I paused iTunes (playing Kate Bush's cover of Rocket Man) to read out the anecdote to my wife. On starting the song again we heard 'I think it's gonna be a long, long time...' and it was so oddly appropriate that we both started laughing aloud!
by ijw @ 15/05/2005 3:05 pm • Permalink •
10
You wrote: I might put it in an envelope and send it back to the Guardian, with a letter of complaint written on the back.
Agree, that's what i would do. When I first saw your photo I thought perhaps you'd made a print, possibly accidentally. Could happen, hmm?
by brendadada @ 15/05/2005 10:06 pm • Permalink •
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