PETA Thanksgiving always awkward as hell

Ever wonder what a PETA Thanksgiving would be like? Of course not. But it turns out it's a serious downer, as we find out in this spot from ad agency Matter and director Dave Laden. The little girl asked to say grace ambushes the family: "Dear God. Thank you for the turkey we are about to eat, and for the turkey farms, where they pack them into dark tiny little sheds for their whole lives. Thank you for when they burn their feathers off while they're still alive, and for when the turkey gets killed by people who think it's fun to stomp on their little turkey heads." Will someone send this brat off to bed without her supper? She might be onto something, though. Skipping the turkey gets you to the whipped cream and pumpkin pie faster. And no, the cream was not harmed during the whipping. Lighten up, PETA!

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Published on November 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under Animals, Gianatasio, Matter, PETA, Thanksgiving

Muscle Milk pilgrim sexing up Thanksgiving

Considering how naughty Halloween has gotten, it was only a matter of time before someone took a crack at Thanksgiving. That someone is Muscle Milk, the athletic drink brand, which channels Justin Timberlake in this spoof hip-hop music video "Sexy Pilgrim" (posted below), courtesy of ad agency Pereira & O'Dell. It's fairly similar to the Smirnoff "Tea Partay" video from a couple years back. The clip is mildly entertaining, although I doubt many people will take Muscle Milk up on the download-the-song option at SexyPilgrim.com. (The coupon might do better.) Muscle Milk is pretty absent from the video, with the muscle-building properties of the protein drink implied via the buff versions of Miles Standish and Squanto.

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

Published on November 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5)
Filed under Food and drink, Morrissey, Muscle Milk, Pereira & O'Dell, Thanksgiving

If nothing else, be thankful for all the beer!

As if we needed further encouragement to crack open a few beers on Thursday, the National Beer Wholesalers Association is telling us that beer—and lots of it!—is now a mandatory part of any Thanksgiving meal. The trade group trots out Brasserie Beck's Bill Catron, a D.C. beer expert who's actually earned a Belgian knighthood for his knowledge of the stuff, to offer guidance: He suggests matching a cold, crisp pilsner with appetizers like shrimp; a 'spicy' blond ale with pumpkin soup; red Flemish ale with leafy greens; and Witt ale with cranberry sauce. After all that, you may have lost interest in the main course, but for those soldiering on with solid food, there's triple style ale to wash down the turkey and stuffing. And (God forbid) there's also beer with dessert, whether it's a Bier de Miel with pumpkin pie or Framboise Lambics with chocolate. If some of your more teetotal guests take issue with chef John Barleycorn's menu, blame it on the Pilgrims who, according to the NBWA, landed at Plymouth Rock with beer!

—Posted by Noreen O'Leary

Published on November 26, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under Alcohol, O'Leary, Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, done the White Castle way

White Castle’s favorite day of the year may be Valentine’s Day, when its more upscale franchises offer dinner by candlelight. But Thanksgiving is a close second. It turns out that White Castle hamburgers are great for making stuffing for your turkey, as long as you add lots and lots of spices to mask that special Slyder taste. Spotted in Brokaw’s weekly e-mail. For more White Castle recipes, update your Amazon.com wish list this holiday season with this scrumptious-sounding book: By the Sackful: A Scrapbook With Recipes From 85 Years of White Castle Craving. We’ll be off doing our own cooking for the next couple of days, so have a great Thanksgiving, and we’ll be back on Monday.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on November 21, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Thanksgiving

Just what we need: a crazier Black Friday

Eight O’Clock Coffee has figured out a way to boost its brand recognition: Give away some product for free. The company’s doing it on Friday, Nov. 23, the day after Thanksgiving, at nine U.S. malls before dawn. (I guess that’s the nation’s No. 1 shopping day. Since I’m a Scrooge when it comes to buying presents, I wouldn’t know.) “It’s just plain wrong to be up so early without a cup of hot, delicious Eight O’Clock Coffee,” coos brand manager Alisa Jacoby (who’s probably tossing darts at Tim Ellis’s photo now that he’s quashed her chances of moving to VW and giving away free Touregs). With the prospect of thousands of caffeine-crazed shoppers straining against the doors to get at the iPhones and Xboxes, I’d recommend skipping work the day after Thanksgiving if you’re employed at the Swansea Mall. Just tell your bosses you got sick from drinking too much coffee. And remember to use those 20 percent discounts well in advance.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

Published on November 12, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Filed under Thanksgiving

Enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend. Or don’t.

In the spirit of the season, here are a few Thanksgiving ads to enjoy. First up are some videos from Butterball, the turkey company, featuring videotaped messages from people to their loved ones, wishing them a Happy Thanksgiving and basically saying what a wonderful place the world is, and families are, and isn’t everything just awfully peachy? To balance things out, here’s a commercial starring Joaquin Phoenix that paints a slightly less rosy picture of Thanksgiving, as a tragic day of hate on which millions of everyday Americans not only condone but delight in perpetrating mass slaughter on innocent birds. It’s for PETA. Whichever you prefer, try to enjoy the holiday.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

Published on November 22, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Filed under Thanksgiving

Butterball turkeys gobble up CGM

Butterball has been running a consumer-generated campaign, asking people to send in videos about Thanksgiving. The seven winning efforts are now airing nationally and can also be seen here. Even if consumer-generated media is all the rage, there is nothing hip about any of these spots—which is part of their appeal. Strangely, none of them are posted on YouTube, though there are plenty of the “Butterball House of Horrors,” backed by PETA. Makes you wonder if that’s why the company stayed away.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

Published on November 8, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Filed under Thanksgiving

It's just another cyber Monday

Just like I don’t understand why people would get up at 5 o’clock in the morning the day after Thanksgiving to shop at Wal-Mart, I don’t understand the thinking behind “Cyber Monday.” In case you haven’t heard, it’s a term coined (pun fully intended!) by Shop.org, meant to denote the first Monday after Thanksgiving, when (it is said) people run to their computers and shop until they have an advanced case of carpal tunnel syndrome. What bunk. As this story on BusinessWeek.com points out, it’s actually only the 12th-biggest online shopping day historically, and my guess is that over time we’ll see that online Christmas shopping’s only predictable pattern is that millions of procrastinators will flock to major retailers like Amazon in the days right before Christmas, racking up huge shipping bills because they didn’t shop earlier. Black Friday, now seen as Cyber Monday’s offline counterpart, makes a certain kind of sense. Thanksgiving has long been the official starting bell for the Christmas season, and with a three-day weekend in front of them, many people—though not I—see it as the perfect time to get a head start on holiday shopping before retailers run out of the season’s hot toys. But online shoppers don’t have to obey any offline shopping rules: The stores don’t close, you can usually find that hard-to-find item on eBay, and you can always buy a few sweaters at Gap.com (assuming the site isn’t down for weeks on end) while the boss is in a meeting. Still, the press has jumped on the term Cyber Monday as if its ranks were filled by the same sorts of people who get up at 5 o’clock in the morning the day after Thanksgiving to shop at Wal-Mart because they’ve heard it’s what you’re meant to do. I have a Christmas wish—a small one—and it’s that the phrase “Cyber Monday” go the way of “information superhighway.”

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

Published on November 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under Thanksgiving

Jeeves takes Thanksgiving break

Whither Jeeves? The Ask Jeeves mascot has endured a rough few months. IAC/InterActive Corp. honcho Barry Diller, who bought Ask Jeeves in March, has spoken darkly of offing Jeeves over the last few months, most recently calling him “a fat butler.”  Jeeves has soldiered on, cheerily greeting searchers at Ask.com and awaiting his date with destiny with a characteristically stiff upper lip. Now, in another snub, it turns out Jeeves’ balloon likeness won’t float down Broadway in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, which it has several times since 1999, including last year. Contacted about this, Ask Jeeves officials insisted nothing is amiss, saying his absence was merely because he doesn’t have the “anchor” status of heavy-hitters like Ronald McDonald and Big Bird, which appear every year. Maybe. But with Barry sharpening the knives, it stands to reason that Jeeves won’t return to the parade, which begs the question of how IAC will dispose of a 70-foot inflatable butler. No listings on eBay— yet.

—Posted by Brian Morrissey

Published on November 23, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Morrissey, Thanksgiving

Inventor of Stove Top stuffing dies

After seeing the front page of The New York Times this morning, you had to wonder if the decision to call out the death of Ruth M. Siems in the news summaries below the fold was an outgrowth of Seasonal Editorial Disorder. Seims, who was 74, was a home economist best known for inventing Stove Top stuffing, thus making the Thanksgiving holiday somewhat less arduous for the cook of the house. In making it to the front page of the Times, she beat out the obit of Hugh Sidey, the Time journalist who covered every U.S. presidency since Eisenhower. According to a Kraft Foods rep, which commented for the Siems obit, the company expects to sell 60 million boxes of the stuffing this Thanksgiving. The secret to Stove Top stuffing, the obit says, was revealed in the patent, which said: “The nature of the cell structure and overall texture of the dried bread crumb employed in this invention is of great importance.” Couldn't have said it better ourselves.

—Posted by Catharine P. Taylor

Published on November 23, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Filed under Thanksgiving

Wieden pie competition gets in-your-face

The annual pre-Thanksgiving "Pie-Off" at Wieden + Kennedy was as pleasantly acrimonious this year as unsweetened allspice, with e-mail intimations that Wieden’s New York staffers "should have a lock on cheesecakes" and could easily cheat by submitting one of several hundred store-baked pies. Europeans, meanwhile, were thought throughout the network to spend so much time baking in relative leisure that lesser bakers should get a handicap. (Not that it mattered in the end; there were no international entries.) Categories included berry/fruit, creme/meringue, chocolate, "straight-up apple", and pumpkin/nut—simple enough guidelines, but perhaps some testiness crept into the competition because apparently there’s no prohibition on trash-talking. "There are no rules," said one of the judges, who needed to remain anonymous. And the winner is: one Dan Kent who won the Grand Prize for his apple-pie entry. Kent, a member of Wieden's IT group, said the top competition was, to his tastebuds, "an outstanding lemon meringue and a mixed-berry with great decoration." Kent divulged his baking secrets exclusively to AdFreak: "I use both butter and shortening in the crust for flexibility and so that it flakes well. On the inside, I use Granny Smith apples for the tartness, to avoid that Hostess Pie syrupy consistency, and fresh spices. For example, I ordered Vietnamese cinnamon from Penzeys Spices. My favorite trick is a couple of tablespoons of finely minced candied ginger, which adds a balance with the cinnamon."

—Posted by Gregory Solman

Published on November 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Filed under Thanksgiving

Take the AdFreak Thanksgiving Quiz!

Welcome to the First (and, quite likely, Last) Annual Adfreak Thanksgiving Quiz. The answers are available in the Census Bureau’s roundup of oddball facts about Thanksgiving-related commerce (your tax dollars at work!). But don’t peek until you’ve tried to come up with your own answers. If you get them all correct, treat yourself to an extra slice of pie on Thursday.

1. According to preliminary estimates, how many turkeys have been raised this year in the U.S.?
a) 68 million
b) 256 million
c) 439 million
d) 1.3 billion

2. How many pounds of turkey did the average American consume in 2003?
a) 3.4 pounds
b) 5.8 pounds
c) 8.7 pounds
d )13.7 pounds

3. Which state produced the most sweet potatoes last year?
a) California
b) Idaho
c) North Carolina
d) Rhode Island

4. In which of the following foods did the U.S. run a trade deficit during the first half of 2005?
a) cranberries
b) live turkeys
c) sweet potatoes

5. Which state produced the most pumpkins last year?
a) California
b) Hawaii
c) Illinois
d) Pennsylvania

Special Bonus Question: Of the towns with “Turkey” in their names, which is most populous?
a) Turkey, N.C
b) Turkey Creek, La.
c) Turkey, Texas

—Posted by Mark Dolliver

Published on November 22, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Filed under Thanksgiving