420 Calories: Turns out stoners are the big consumers of fast food ... so naturally, businesses are targeting them in ads:
Rob Dyrdek
I'm Selling Burritos Now
... FOR POTHEADS
Forget Daniel Tosh -- the only beef Rob Dyrdek's got now is in his brand new line of frozen burritos ... and he's marketing them directly to STONERS.
No joke -- the MTV star and his cousin Chris "Drama" Pfaff have spawned a frozen burrito company called Loud Mouth Burritos -- which they claim will "revolutionize the age-old eating experience by combining Mexicana and Americana flavors under the roof of a tortilla."
The "Fantasy Factory" duo is hawking two options for now: Cheeseburger -- stuffed with hamburger meat, cheese, ketchup and mustard ... and Pepperoni Pizza -- with mozzarella, pepperoni and tomato sauce.
And the best part -- the burritos are only 420 calories each. GET IT?!?!?!
The frozen goods are currently being sold at several 24-hour Kum and Go and Maverik convenience stores -- perfect for those late night munchies -- and they're hoping to expand to 10,000 locals by the end of summer.
tmz.com
..... And the burritos are destined to join the crowded shelves of microwaveable gas station snacks. But then a couple weeks ago, TMZ broke some interesting news about Dyrdek’s burritos: They’ll be marketed "directly to stoners." It's a remarkably blunt, if slightly risky, approach for a guy whose paychecks typically depends on teenagers' allowances and the spending money of corporate suits at Viacom. But it also makes sense, given the longstanding overlap of three activities: watching MTV, smoking pot and chowing down on frozen burritos. Calls to Loud Mouth to confirm this strategy went unanswered, and its website makes no references to weed. But the answer is easy to find if you know where to look. In fact, it’s right there on the back of the burrito: 420 calories.
Stoners began scouring Taco Bell ads for even more subliminal references. Is that the sound of someone taking at hit five seconds into this video? Is the bell at the end of commercials making the sound of the word “bong”?
That kind of winking and nudging is typical in the emergent genre of ads aimed at stoners, a once taboo marketing approach recently embraced most blatantly by the fast food industry. Just look at the actor in the next burger commercial you see. Odds are he’ll be a glassy-eyed Spicoli, dropping coded reefer references (see Jack in the Box's favorite mumbling pothead). Companies as big as Taco Bell and General Mills have gotten in on the act and they’re reaping the rewards. Taco Bell, with its Doritos-taco hybrid and “late night munchies” tagline saw a six percent sales increase in the first quarter of 2012. General Mills, which revived Cheech and Chong for a Fiber One web campaign, deemed the ad so successful it plans to do more just like it. Then there’s Sonic and its hallucinating twenty-something dreaming of man-sized cheesy tots. Carl’s Jr. is touting its “wake and bake” habit. Denny's is promoting a reggae-loving unicorn. And who could forget the ultimate stoner picaresque in modern cinema: "Harold and Kumar go to White Castle." White Castle actually signed on for that film (and its sequel).
“If you're targeting that heavy fast food user you need to speak their language,” says Denise Yohn, a brand consultant who’s worked with restaurants for 25 years. “One way to do that is to talk about partying and munchies. To the mainstream audience it may just sound like late nights and drinking, but to a certain audience they're talking about getting stoned.”
No company better straddles the line than Taco Bell. Owned by Yum! Brands (which sounds like it was named by a stoner), Taco Bell introduced the idea of the “Fourth Meal” in 2006. Described as “the meal between dinner and breakfast,” Fourth Meal was launched with a goofy website full of pajama-clad kids wandering the streets and gorging on Gorditas. About the same time Taco Bell ads began referencing the “late night munchies,” a gaggle of Tex Mex-based superheroes were concocted to “save people everywhere from cruddy combos and late night munchies,” and soon a song composed around those three words showed up in TV and radio ads. Stoners quickly caught on and began scouring Taco Bell ads for even more subliminal references. Is that the sound of someone taking at hit five seconds into this video? Is the bell at the end of commercials making the sound of the word “bong”?
Yohn says Taco Bell is “pushing the limit just enough so that they're not creating too much offense,” an approach that some smaller companies don’t think is necessary. Where big corporations use dog whistles, these little guys are just peeing on consumer’s legs.
“A lot of companies are skipping the innuendo,” says Yohn. “They think it's more effective to be overt. It creates more buzz. I think that's why you see a lot of advertising that seems unapologetically targeted to pot smokers.”
....... thefix.com
Jack in the Box Stoner Dude
youtube.com
This is hilarious - Cheech & Chong do a commercial for Magic Brownies which turn out to be Fiber One brownies:
youtube.com
Wake and bake - "hit me up at hailmaryjane.com"
hailmaryjane.com |
