An end to the Soup Wars...
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You may have read about the bitter skirmish between the Campbell Soup Co.and Progresso soups. (We wrote about it on this blog back in November.) Well, it may finally be Soup Armistice Day, according to an article in Advertising Age.
As we wrote before, the fight got going with Campbell print ads that featured Progresso soups with ‘MSG’ written next to them, and Campbell Select Harvest offerings with ‘TLC’ written next to them.There were TV ads too, in which a woman with a blindfold tasted Progresso soups and guessed, ‘MSG’ then tasted Campbell ones and guessed ‘Chicken! One hundred percent...white meat.’
Progresso’s maker, General Mills, got ticked and fired back with ad barrages of its own.
The two got into a counting game with each other over who had more MSG-free soups.
And the Glutamate Assn. got miffed at all these ads intimating there was anything bad about MSG anyway, when all the substance did, after all, was ‘provide consumers with exactly what they want -- a soup that tastes good.’
According to the Advertising Age article, the Campbell ads worked pretty well, even though ‘the approach worried several analysts, who fretted that the negative ads would bring down the entire soup category.’ My Lord, what would we have done then? But May financial figures for Campbell were robust, showing a 4% jump in the company’s ready-to-serve soup category.
Still, Campbell has decided to run a clean campaign this fall, the article further notes. Now that consumers know what the brand isn’t, the plan is to talk about what it is.
General Mills had already gotten into trouble with its ads, according to an Aug. 4 article in Brandweek: ‘The National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureaus has recommended that General Mills discontinue comparative advertising for its Progresso Soup brand .... NAD took issue with a claim by Progresso in a print ad that ‘Campbell has 95 soups with MSG,’ while Progresso has ’26 soups with no MSG.’ .... While that claim is true, NAD ruled that it gives the impression that all Campbell soups have MSG and none of Progresso’s do, which is not the case. NAD reasoned that the average consumer would falsely conclude that any Progresso soup is less likely to have MSG than a Campbell soup because of the ad.’
We will strive to keep you posted on any new developments.
-- Rosie Mestel