Dive Brief:
- "Avocados from Mexico," the marketing arm of the Mexican Hass Avocado Importers Association, is planning two campaigns aimed at U.S. consumers.
- Both ad campaigns feature digital and social-media components and are aimed at getting Americans to eat avocados during the winter months when domestic varieties are not available.
- The first campaign, dubbed " the 'Feliz Navidad Programme," features actor Mario Lopez. A second campaign, dubbed the "Super Bowl/Winter Sports Programme," features a guacamole recipe contest run through social media.
Dive Insight:
Like many Americans of a certain age, we never ate an avocado when we were kids. They just weren't available at grocers in large portions of the U.S. That's hard to imagine today, when it seems avocados have become ubiquitous in American cuisine. We can't be the only ones to notice, for example, that avocados are now the go-to food for parents of young babies. Spooning globs of baby food from a jar suddenly seems so 1960s. Just let the little darling make some finger guacamole.
Nor can we be the only ones to have noticed that "Avocados from Mexico" ran a series of national television ads during the Major League Baseball playoff games earlier this year. That marked the first national TV campaign for the marketing association and linked the Great American Pastime to one of the staples of the Mexican diet. It's a link that seems perfectly appropriate today, but was unimaginable just a few decades ago.