"Hey! I've got an idea! We'll invite a bunch of opinionated, snobby food bloggers to come eat at a five-star restaurant. We'll promise them a gourmet meal prepared by a celebrity chef! BUT... We'll give them highly processed, sodium drenched frozen meals, instead! Everyone loves a good bait-and-switch commercial! No one will EEEEEVR be pissed about being lied to and fed something nowhere near the quality of what they were promised!"
Honestly, that's how I imagine that ConAgra meeting going. I really have no idea what Ketchum was thinking when they were approached with this idea and had no problem going forward. How someone with Ketchum didn't see this idea on paper and tell ConAgra "your idea is stupid" is beyond me.
Sure, this idea has worked in the past. We've seen the commercials where someone is taken into a restaurant and given pizza or soup and loved it, and then the staff comes out and tells them they just ate DiGiorno's or whatever. But the reason those commercials worked is that those were simple, everyday people, not pretentious mommy bloggers who attack big companies every day. Those every day people weren't promised five-star meals prepared by chefs they've seen on television. They just walked into a regular place for a regular meal. THAT is where ConAgra and Ketchum really dropped the ball. You can't bring in volatile personalities and set up grandiose expectations, and not expect massive backlash when you completely yank the rug out from under them.
Ketchum and ConAgra should have stuck with the same formula as those before them. Regular people, regular locations, regular food. If it isn't broken...
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