Vitamin Water gets massive publicity for new flavor: Utter BS It's your lucky day: sugary soft drink maker Vitamin Water has said it will give you $100,000 if you are able to give up your smartphone for a year. That's right, in a country of 328 million people where the average wage is around $50,000, a company that sells sugar drinks has decided to do what generations of lawmakers have …
Likewise. Saw "vitamin water" in the headline in the feed, and thought it sounded like a startup with some possibly-novel proposition, perhaps on the health bandwagon like coconut water or birch water. Except that the gimmick seemed implausible.
Do I take it "vitamin water" is something 'merkins would automatically recognise as a brand name? I guess El Reg's .uk heritage must be pretty-much dead when it assumes we'll recognise the name.
You can get in the UK, for example here - https://groceries.morrisons.com/webshop/product/Glaceau-Vitaminwater-Multiv-Lemonade/114038011?param=vitamin+water&from=search
Also available at Asda and Waitrose. Used to be available at Tesco and Sainsburys, but not any more.
"Do I take it "vitamin water" is something 'merkins would automatically recognise as a brand name?"
Not American, but living outside of the UK and I recognise it. It's not bad, but I'll drink blue powerade. So the "natural healthy" aspect isn't for me.
Essentially it's the whole scam of selling a bottle of water for a couple of bucks. The water (or water based beverage) costs generally more to keep sterile, bottle and distribute than to manufacture, so it's all down to marketing. and putting the appropriate filling and label on it. It's what Cola and Pepsi do so well :)
It's also why brand name soft drinks are so expensive. Even when they cut out sugar in exchange for cheaper sweeteners, they cost at least twice what the full fat varieties do. For advertising. So you end up paying more for a product, in order to have money spent persuading you to buy said product.
Essentially it's the whole scam of selling a bottle of water for a couple of bucks
The Two Ronnies were ahead of their time with this sketch...
Most people know to look for the small print saying that their chances to win anything of value are non-existing, or entail huge sacrifices.
Unfortunately there is a surprisingly large amount of people who just wants to believe someone out there wants to give them thousands of dollars just out of the kindness of his heart. (Which is actually less believable than the existence of Santa Claus.)
Unless you are a delivery driver ( and i assume not) you have my sympathies ( and they're a rare, very rare thing).
Once a month is my limit.
tbf, it's quite an accomplished and well designed campaign. Nothing new, back in the good old days many a business offered a small prize for the public using their creative minds in submitting a multitude of free slogans, some good some crap but usually a winner is in there.
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Since yours truly lives in Vienna let me elaborate: Vienna City services (from trash collection to dog tax) are organized into "Magistratsabteilungen", or "Divisions of the Magistrate", called MAx with x being a Number between 1 and somewhere around 70.
The series is about an imaginary "MA2412", the division responsible for Christmas decoration - you can imagine that a division of civil servants having exactly nothing to do for 10+ months of the year (and I mean exactly nothing, not the figurative-but-true nothing) creates a good backdrop for a comedy series.
Bad thing though, that neither script nor acting nor ... ahem ... anything in that series is of better quality than what would be produced by a "Magistratsabteilung"
"imaginary "MA2412""
But I learned about it from a VHS video tape I got directly from the ORF-Shop. Surely their standards of reporting wouldn't allow them to just lie on video tape. It would be like if Doctor Who would turn out to just have been made up.
In short, we are, remain, and have always been suckers. But then Vitamin Water already knew it. It makes a ton of money selling "vitamin water."
It won't be us rational humans but probably the FB users who jump all over this type of thing.. money for nothing, yada,yada, yada and instant popularity. Some of the stories I've heard from friends use FB make the place seem to be grifters' wet dream.
Target audience? Splendid idea! Sadly less ethical (or lawful) than branding 'Vitamin Water'. Or could explain why there's pressure to ban high capacity magazines.
But this being the Internet, could you make >$100,000 placing your phone inside a bottle of 'Vitamin Water' and livestreaming it for a year?
When I'm NOT punishing myself at some fast food place, all I ever drink are water and coffee. Plain water, to be clear. Not something called 'vitamin water' which is inexplicably NOT supposed to imply it is in any way healthy. Wait, scratch that. I do occasionally drink genuine vitamin water. The water is washing down a vitamin in pill form and helps speed its dissolution if by chance my gut isn't already half full of coffee.
What?
"Vitamin" -> $RELIABLE_HEALTH_INFO_SOURCE said that this is good
"Water" -> Intuitively known as good
"Vitamin Water" -> "no consumer could be reasonably misled" et cetera?
How can their statement make sense to a person who never tried the beverage nor knows that the parent company is a megacorp?
-- I'm with relatives for the holidays, and I saw this ad. It was unclear from the context, but I assumed that only one person would be chosen to get the cookie.
The beverage itself is a rather pallid concoction of fruit juices (not enough for flavor, really, just enough to add color) and sugar. The "Zero" variety is sweetened with stevia and a tiny bit of fructose. Overall, the low-cal variety of the drink is a better choice than sweet tea or bottled "lemonade" if you're on the road and can't drink a sensible, healthy beverage such as beer.
across someone's forehead advertising the product.
No link handy but some years back The Reg had an article with some dumb redneck, probably quite impoversished too, taking them up on the offer, to be paid $100,000 if they had the radio stations logo and frequency tattooed on their forehead. Doing so and not getting the payout, going to court and losing*. Because "advertising" by itself is a "puff" and not meant to be taken seriously.
To add insult to injury (self inflicted mind) the radio station changed it's name and frequency shortly afterwards.
*tbf if i were a Judge i'd have ruled in his favour.
“The smartphone is a threat to the Amish not only for the darker aspects of the internet, such as access to pornography, but also for the way it can change the way we behave,” says Erik Wesner, founder of the authoritative Amish America website. “We have all got quickly used to finding instant solutions online. These can erode traditional values that the Amish revere, such as patience and dependence upon their community
Where I live, the supermarket trolleys in the checkout queues are loaded up with bottles and bottles of what they call "water". Adding vitamins to it is an expensive waste of time when you see how much people will pay to drink something that tastes a little bit of plastic, rather than the perfectly drinkable stuff that comes out of the tap for free.
I was recently in hospital and a well meaning friend or relative brought me a couple of bottles of Vitamin Water to prevent me from perishing. I don't normally buy it on principal, so it was interesting to examine the bottle up close. Not only is the moniker deliberately misleading, but the packaging also resembles that of a medical product, with clear but densely packed text and simple panels of colour.
It does, however, show a certain amount of villainous chutzpah on the part of the corporate overlords. One can imagine their lawyer winning the case when they were sued for misrepresentation. No doubt being millimeters within the law, and probably exploiting some obscure technicality - he does a burnout in the parking lot in his Porsche whilst flipping the assembled press the bird, and goes on to make celebratory use of the facilities available at the nearest brothel with considerable enthusiasm.
Arbitrarily adding vitamins to drinks and foods is increasing our risk of overdose, adverse side-effects and toxic damage. Drug store (pharmacy etc.) advertising piles of vitamins can be very dangerous to your health. The great thing for them is: the more we take of excessive additives, the more feel bad, the more we think that more additives will help us, the more we buy. Whole foods with minimal processing is best. Avoid added sugar, avoid artificial sweeteners.
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