Bananas ship bearing ABC blurbs
FROM DAILY VARIETY GOTHAM – MADISON AVE
Media companies are virtually tripping over one another to associate themselves with new-fangled Web-oriented applications and other digital diversions. For ABC TV, however, there’s fruit — bananas, to be precise, as shoppers at Balducci’s and other upscale bodegas are beginning to notice.
For this is the month that ABC ad agency TBWA Chiat/Day is having 30 million pieces of one of nature’s more perfect foods shipped cross-country with such labels as: “Another Fine Use of Yellow,” “TV. Zero Calories” and, of course, ABC’s umbrella theme “We Love TV.”
According to banana importer Turbana Corp., only one ABC label is being affixed per bunch, but there’s always the pass-along readership that extends to everybody who saunters by the household fruit bowl.
Although the project is the biggest yet for TBWA-retained The Fruit Label Co., it is, not the first time bananas have been transformed into a ripe-for-the-peeling ad medium. Last year, label-size stickers bore the “Got Milk?” catchphrase in an even better example of “point-of-association” placement. Then again, “Chiquita” and “Dole” have always been icons of the produce aisle.
