Lipstick on a Pig
By Jonathan Maziarz / October 22, 2008
The phrase has made a startling resurgence in the last few months after coming from the mouth of Barack Obama (talking about John McCain’s seeming fondness for Bush-Rove dirty politics). But I prefer the phrase as a descriptor for deceptive marketing.
You’ve probably seen the commercials on TV lately that are pushing high-fructose corn syrup as some delightful sweetener handed down from the Lord like manna from heaven. Wholesome images of attractive young couples lounging in the park and eating popsicles sweetened with HFCS are meant to evoke the essential goodness of the product. The ads come off like a bad East German propaganda film from the ‘70s, which would have been fine if they’d been trying to be ironic, but since they were striving for earnest, they struck a painfully discordant note.
Still you can’t blame the Corn Refiners Association for trying.
I don’t know about you, but when I’m jotting down attributes I’d like my food to have, “created in a refinery” and “not to be found in nature” aren’t high on the list. Here in South Florida, you can go to any farmer’s market and buy raw sugar cane. Peel it, take a bite and you get the unmistakable flavor of sugar. You’ll have to travel a lot further to find the raw ingredient for HFCS. Wait, what? Doesn’t it come from corn? Yes, but not the kind you can buy at the supermarket. The corn that eventually begets HFCS is an industrial commodity that’s also used to make plastic and ethanol, neither of which you’ll be consuming anytime soon.
And what does this saccharine brawl have to do with content marketing?
Three things: honesty, transparency and authenticity.
The HFCS ads have been relentlessly mocked by late night comedians and amateur filmmakers on YouTube. The ads flopped because they were not honest, they obfuscated the truth and, ultimately, failed the litmus test of public authentication.
It’s one thing to have a content marketing strategy, but without genuine, accurate and compelling content, it’s all for naught. The public is too smart and media has become too democratized.
— Jonathan