Gordon Ramsay is a celebrity chef, perhaps best known for his fiery temper and the harsh criticism he levels at contestants on his cooking shows. If Ramsay judges that food isn’t cooked properly, that the texture is off, or that presentation is less than perfect, he is likely to yell at the offending chef and maybe even throw the food across the room. That can make for good TV, but does it make for a good commercial? Not when NAD is doing the judging.
In a series of ads for Welch’s Fruit Snacks, Ramsay steps into the role of Chief Fruit Officer and compares Welch’s snacks to competing snacks. In one commercial, he picks up a box labeled “Fruit Flavored Snacks,” complains that “there’s barely any fruit in there,” and kicks it into a lobster tank. In another commercial, Ramsay tastes the competing snack, spits it back into the box, and throws the box out the window. Ramsay prefers the Welch’s product because it’s “made with whole fruit as the main ingredient.”
General Mills challenged the ads, alleging that they communicate “an unsupported implied claim that competitive fruit flavored snacks are worthless garbage” because they don’t contain “whole fruit” like the Welch’s Fruit Snacks. Welch’s countered that, unlike competing products, their snacks “contain at least 50% puree made from various whole fruits” and that its ads simply highlight “the distinctions between Welch’s Fruit Snacks and other products in an entertaining and humorous manner.”
NAD started with the premise that it’s “well settled that while humor may be used to highlight a truthful distinction between products, a humorous advertisement should not communicate a message that falsely disparages a competitor’s product.” Here, because the competing products were literally kicked across a room, spit out, and thrown out a window, NAD determined the commercials conveyed a “message that they are garbage because they are not made with real fruit.”
If you’ve followed NAD cases on disparagement, that analysis probably isn’t surprising. But what about the fact that the commercials don’t feature any competitors? Instead, the commercials just depict a generic box labelled “Fruit Flavored Snacks.” NAD wrote that it’s “also well settled that an advertisement need not identify a specific competitor or competing product for it to be falsely disparaging.” Unfortunately, this decision doesn’t go into any more detail about where NAD may draw the line.
Welch’s was in a difficult spot. If you’re going to pay Gordon Ramsay to appear in your commercial, you’re going to want him to hurl both insults and food across the room in order to get your money’s worth. That’s what Ramsay is known for and that’s (presumably) what audiences want to see. But NAD is a much tougher audience than most and they’ll frown at things that make other viewers laugh – particularly if the laughter is at someone else’s expense.
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