In celebration of National Orange Juice Day, juice company Tropicana is expanding its product portfolio – and hoping to catch the eye of younger consumers via a new push on social media – with the upcoming release of Tropicana Crunch.
Orange juice has long been a breakfast staple, but most of us prefer it in a glass. Now Tropicana is shaking things up by encouraging consumers to try orange juice directly on top of their cereal.
The juice company has just announced the upcoming release of Tropicana Crunch, its new breakfast cereal, which has been created specifically to be paired with orange juice instead of milk. According to the brand, this is an untraditional culinary combo that 15 million Americans – ”the total populations of New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago combined” – have already tried.
Tropicana Crunch is slated for release on May 4, National Orange Juice Day in the United States. Consumers can visit http://www.tropicanacrunch.com beginning on May 4 to snag their own box of the honey almond-flavored cereal.
Even the brand acknowledges on its new product’s website that Tropicana Crunch is a bit of an oddity that may not immediately become a culture-wide phenomenon. “Orange juice on cereal. Some call it weird. Some call it breakfast. We… didn’t even know it was a thing,” the brand says on the Tropicana Crunch website. “It may not be for everyone (but it could be for you!).”
The brand hopes to boost engagement with fans after the release of its new breakfast cereal with an accompanying social media campaign. Whether they “loved it or loathed it,” the brand says, fans are encouraged to describe their experience with Tropicana Crunch on Instagram and TikTok while tagging the brand and using the hashtag #TropicanaCrunch. The brand has also recruited a cohort of “TikTok’s top taste-test influencers” to try the OJ-drenched product and spread the word to their legions of followers.
Have you ever wondered how food looks so mouthwatering in advertisements? Steve Giralt is a food photographer. He has worked for brands like Hershey’s, Budweiser, Pepsi, and Starbucks. Steve uses a symphony of people, cameras, and robots to get the perfect shot.
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The Warner Bros. logo has always been more irreverent than the marks of other major media brands. Think of Bugs Bunny, one hand leaning against the edge of the shield, the other holding a half-eaten carrot. Or similarly posed Michigan J. Frog, the top-hatted mascot of defunct teen television channel the WB.
Unlike say Disney, which is undeniably a family brand, Warner Bros. has always had many audiences and identities. It has more flex. And now, after WarnerMedia’s freshly sealed merger with Discovery, the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery brand is drawing on that storied, multifaceted visual identity from the past to launch itself into the future.
“We think of Warner Bros. as legendary, iconic, historic,” says Sagi Haviv, partner and designer at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv, whose firm started working on branding the as-yet-unformed media giant in early October. On April 8, AT&T formally handed over WarnerMedia’s assets to Discovery, creating Warner Bros. Discovery in a massive $43 billion merger. The company combines WarnerMedia’s assets (a 99-year-old movie studio, as well as television brands like CNN and HBO) with Discovery’s (including HGTV, Food Network, and TLC). And the new logo pairs the company’s lengthy new name with a sharp, flat design take on the classic WB shield.
The new logo follows a leaked mock-up logo from an internal presentation that was widely ridiculed online in June. That logo, one part Superman, one part WordArt, with a dash of movie magic, was a visual representation to accompany the announcement of the proposed merger, not a bona fide mark. (The tagline “The stuff that dreams are made of” is the last line delivered by Humphrey Bogart’s character in the 1941 noir The Maltese Falcon.) Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv was not involved with it.
One can, perhaps, forgive Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, formerly head of Discovery, for leaning into that cinematic urge. After all, AT&T bought Warner Bros. in 2018 as part of the Texas-based telecom’s acquisition of parent company TimeWarner, then “slashed and burned through the Warner Bros. ranks and . . . pushed Warner to start behaving as more of a technology company and less of an entertainment one,” as The New York Times reported. The logo got a similar treatment: It was stripped of its iconic gold color and dipped in AT&T’s blue and white.
As Warner Bros. Discovery, the company is embracing its entertainment roots once again and has the logo to match. The shield is back in its full blue-and-gold glory.
Warner Bros. Discovery could have gone with a more abstract visual identity to appear consistent with competing media giants like Amazon and Netflix (not to mention Disney, whose logo has been simplified dramatically over the years). But this new mark isn’t meant to make Warner Bros. Discovery fit in.
“What is a logo meant to do? It’s meant to set you apart, differentiate you. You don’t want to be like others, so that’s one thing,” Haviv says. “The other thing is, they are not like those others. They are storytellers, and the Warner Brothers brand really stands for that and that is why this was selected to be the banner.”
In other words, by embracing—even flaunting—its legacy as an entertainment company above all else, Warner Bros. Discovery hopes that it will be able to better compete against other media brands in the streaming world and beyond. The shield has played before hundreds of iconic movies and TV shows of the past century. It reminds audiences that the company’s library includes not just breadth of content, but depth.
Still, Haviv says that strategy-wise, the design team was careful “not to capture nostalgia alone.” The inspiration for this new logo comes from the 1948 WB shield—a gold, three-dimensional shape that first appeared (in black and white) in the opening credits of Key Largo, another Bogart-starring noir classic. It could easily look antiquated.
So the designers took pains to nudge the overall look in a modern direction. Creating more symmetry between the letters was one such tweak. Without the ribbon of text across the middle traditionally usually used in the shield, the size difference between W and B is more obvious. Filling that space made it look more like a cohesive interpretation rather than a direct translation. But a W is wide and a B is more of a standard width, so giving them equal space inside the shape involved redrawing the swoop of the B to fill the gap in the upper right corner.
The second challenge was equalizing the weight of the border with the weight of the letters so that everything appears as a single unit. That harmony, Haviv says, is what makes it feel “more contemporary, more of today and tomorrow.” One can imagine a form like that easily scaling down to a favicon while still looking at home on a movie poster.
It takes a lot of time, money, and exposure to build meaning into a logo, Haviv says, but the Warner Bros. shield already comes with that time-worn weight. So while the idea of borrowing a symbol from the past for a future-oriented company may seem counterintuitive, the choice was deliberate, and the execution nuanced. The shield is proportioned to be small, Haviv says, “like a jewel,” compared to the main story, which “is more the word, the name.”
Despite the complexity that comes from creating a visual identity in the middle of a major corporate merger, Haviv says that the leadership at Warner Bros, Discovery, especially Zaslav, had a lot of vision. Creativity, storytelling, longevity . . . “all of these qualities are built already into that shield,” Haviv says, “and you can’t buy that.”
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Fast food restaurant brand Taco Bell is bringing back the Mexican Pizza, as announced by Doja Cat at Coachella, but what did the singer do to establish its return and how did she become the chain’s spokesperson?
Doja Cat’s debut Coachella stage was everything we wanted – and more. She brought out Tyga and Rico Nasty, and performed new song Vegas that will feature in Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming movie Elvis.
What we didn’t expect was breaking news regarding the return of the Mexican Pizza at Taco Bell. The singer is known to be a loyal fan of the fast-food fave and has been campaigning for the item’s return since it was taken off the menu in 2020.
Let’s take a look at her perseverance for the sake of Mexican Pizza over the past year.
Doja Cat, a Taco Bell partner, announced the mouthwatering news at the weekend and the chain followed with a press release on Monday, stating the singer “literally dropped the mic with the hot news of the Mexican Pizza’s return this May”.
It wasn’t just Doja at the forefront of the Mexican Pizza movement, more than 200,000 fans signed a Change.org petition spearheaded by Krish Jagirdar, who called the item a “bridge to American culture for kids who grew up in immigrant households”.
The Mexican Pizza, which features refried beans and ground beef sandwiched between crispy tortillas and topped with melted cheese and tomatoes, will be available from 19 May.
The 200,000 signatures surely made a difference but would it have had the same impact without a passionate celeb at the forefront?
Taco Bell removed the fan favourite in 2020 as chains streamlined menus following the pandemic, while the packaging reportedly “accounted for more than seven million pounds of paperboard annually in the US”.
The Say So singer’s history with the chain dates to May 2021, when she tweeted her determination to bring back the pizza.
Taco Bell congratulated Doja Cat on her album release in June 2021 but never got back to her about the product. By September, an irritated Doja complained to Taco Bell.
“I want my Mexican Pizza back @tacobell why u quiet”, she tweeted.
Two hours later, the company hinted it was actually considering the Mexican Pizza’s return but all remained quiet until Doja asked for more information after Taco Bell featured one of her songs in a commercial.
By February 2022, the rapper was truly part of the Taco Bell team as she starred in its Super Bowl 2022 ad, The Grande Escape, covering Hole track Celebrity Skin.
The 26-year-old proved she could create music about anything with her viral ditty about the food item, although she forbade anyone to call it a jingle. Joking she was forced to make a song due to “contractual reasons”, she claimed she had tried to make the track bad but it came out pretty catchy and went viral on TikTok.
There you have it, Doja got the Mexican Pizza thanks to her perseverance and ability to create a tune Taco Bell couldn’t resist.
Ogilvy UK, one of the world’s leading advertising agencies, has announced it will no longer be partnering with influencers who retouch their faces or bodies in brand campaigns, as part of an initiative to combat the ills of social media.
Rahul Titus, Ogilvy’s Head of Influence, told The Drum that consumers look to content creators as the “authentic side” of marketing, but with how distorted their images have become, it’s now “harmful” to those who frequent social networking platforms.
In addition, Titus hopes the company’s brand-new commitment to not working with influencers who alter their pictures will aid in the UK government passing the Digitally Altered Body Image Bill, which would require brand spokespersons to disclose edited content to consumers.
As Dr Luke Evans, the Member of Parliament who introduced the bill, put it: “These edited images do not represent reality, and are helping to perpetuate a warped sense of how we appear, with real consequences for people suffering with body confidence issues.”
Over the next two months, the agency plans to roll out its changes in separate phases: first, by consulting brands and influencers on the new policy, then by implementing the ban. It has said all edited sponsored or paid-for content influencer posts will cease by December this year.
If you’re wondering if influencers will still be allowed to edit their pictures at all, the answer is yes. Ogilvy will still permit work with adjusted contrast or brightness. It draws the line at retouches made to a subject’s skin or body.
In order to ensure influencers are compliant, the firm will make use of ‘InfluenceO’, an emerging technology stack that detects when pictures have been retouched or distorted.
Overall, Titus said he hopes the agency will be a leader in the industry and will spur a change in influencer marketing all over the globe.
Just maybe, after years of editing and retouching, we’re moving towards embracing our real selves.
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