The Food Scout

With names like “Cocaine” and “Bawls” found on beverages these days, why would anyone think twice about potential newcomers like “Tru Blood” or “Booty Sweat.” But increasingly, consumers will have to think twice about whether a new edgy product is going to make them look cool or feel like a sucker, literally.

I myself was almost fooled by a recent print ad I saw in Entertainment Weekly for a bottled red drink called “Tru Blood” with the headline “Real Blood is for Suckers.” Hardly shocking at all these days, now that we’ve used all the other drink names like “Whoop Ass” and “Dopamine: Vegas in a Can.” But the fine print on the ad gave me cause for concern when I read “synthetic blood,” which made me wonder if some company had gone too far with the blood analogy, and if this product, too, would suffer the same withdrawal fate that Cocaine Energy Drink had seen.

I filed the product away in my mind for further investigation later, but soon discovered this ad was simply one of many unusual ones hyping a new HBO movie. Some consumers took the ad literally, however, and asked many a puzzled convenience store cashiers where they could find a six-pack of Tru Blood. Guess what, you stupid energy drink consumers, you’ve just been Punk’d!

Similarly, an even more tasteless (literally, again, hopefully) product called “Booty Sweat” hit the markets recently. Fortunately, this wasn’t an introduction by a beverage company that had run out of names with shock potential; actually, it was a promotion vehicle intended to create buzz about Paramount’s new action-movie spoof “Tropic Thunder,” which opens in mid-August and features the fictional Booty Sweat energy drink product as part of a movie about action-film actors who get involved in a war, with a wink at the overuse of product licensing.

This fiction-to-reality tactic, of course, is a more grown-up version of what we saw a year ago when the Simpsons movie was promoted via previously fictional products found only in Simpsons’ cartoons that suddenly suddenly appeared at selected 7-Eleven units that were temporarily converted to Kwikee Marts.

Obviously the idea of using the food & beverage industry to promote movies (beyond a mention on a plastic cup) is gaining steam. Consumers who don’t want to be punk’d had better stick to tried and true brands like Oreos and Pepsi, or risk being the unwitting contributor to promoting the latest movie tie-in (is it possible that there were actually consumers who thought Squishees and KrustyO’s were simply real-world new product introductions?).