Is it too much to advertise a movie on a banana?

With the summer blockbusters coming out earlier and earlier each year—this year I think the front runner is MI:3 in early May—Los Angeles has become a veritable monopoly board of summer blockbuster billboard real estate. Everywhere you go, you see billboards for the aforementioned MI:3, XMEN 3 (one of my personal fave campaigns) and Superman. It got me thinking about advertising and how much is too much? Then I remembered the below:

A while ago, I bought a bunch of bananas in my local Ralphs supermarket. Though Ralphs is a place I rarely shop in, it was close to another store I was in, open and I needed some bananas for breakfast the next morning. I vaguely noticed the stickers on my bananas (most fruit has some sort of "Made in..." sticker on them, don't they?), packed them in my basket, paid and headed for home.

The next morning, as I went to peel the banana to slice and put in my cereal, I noticed something odd about the sticker. It had a monkey on it. Kind of cute, I guess. Something familiar caught my eye and I looked closer. The monkey sticker was not the logo for the company that produces the bananas but a nickel size advertisement for the movie, Curious George. I couldn't believe it. I know I live in LA, a city inundated with advertisements for movies on everything from bus shelters to billboards to movie tickets to in-store displays, but on bananas! Would having a sticker on the banana make me want to see Curious George because Curious George presumably eats bananas? Do studios think that the public is that dumb? Or is it that they think that the target audience for Curious George are clearly banana lovers? Just to see if perhaps this might have been some stunt put on by my local Ralph's the next day, I went to another to check out the bananas. Sure enough, the ever so subtle Curious George stickers were on every single banana in the store. Is this even legal? How can a studio buy out the Ralphs banana supplier sticker space? Why is that okay?

As someone who has spent their career as a marketer (especially one who has had to market indie films) I applaud anyone that thinks out of the box to get their product across. But I have to say, having a movie promotion sticker on my banana crossed some weird moral line with me. Do we have to resort to marketing on fruit because the advertising marketplace is so saturated with cereal boxes, beer, diet soda, and cookies that we have to start marketing on stuff that is good for you.

Ohmigod, maybe that is it. Bananas are good for you so therefore Curious George is good for you too. Genius.

Keeping it indie,
Julie