Not Buttered

Apparently, most members of the Working Class are enthusiastic consumers of a spread called "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" According to the rubric on the back of the carton, the stuff contains buttermilk and a range of chemicals and various noxious additives. The ensemble is evidently supposed to approximate the taste of the genuine article so closely that, at some stage or other, one, or several, of the beta-testers obviously uttered the sentence that gave the product its name.

How fortunate it is, then, that they didn't exclaim, "Well fuck me if this doesn't taste exactly like butter!" or "You can call me a TOTAL CUNT if this stuff is anything other than genuine butter!" Then again, maybe a few people actually did. The trouble with calling a product by either of those names, though, is that you might then have problems persuading the ITC to approve your television commercials.

One solution would probably be to screen your commercials sufficiently late in the evening that the majority of those likely to be offended would have gone to bed. As, for example, they do with those adverts for chat lines for homosexuals. Unfortunately, virtually the only people then watching them would be homosexuals, thus severely limiting your market demographics. As a result, the supermarket dairy sections - especially anywhere associated with low-fat spreads - would soon turn into gay pick-up areas, and you'd risk being buggered every time you went to get a carton of milk. The only safe option would be to switch to UHT, stored in a different aisle, which isn't something I'd relish.

A safer idea, then, would be not to advertise per se, but to get your margarine featured in appropriately certified films as part of a product placement. "Last Tango in Paris" is one that comes immediately to mind. It’s just a shame that Marlon Brando is dead. They could have remade the film and had him reprise that famous scene where he smears his hand with margarine and sticks it up the girl's arse.

This is a potentially risky strategy, of course, inasmuch as your competitors might then claim that's all it's actually good for. However, I feel that someone of Brando's acting talents should be able to convey something of the product's taste and easy spreadability aspects, too. Compared to a block of butter straight from the fridge, anyway, which must be a bugger to get up anyone's arse.