DIANE BRADY, SENIOR WRITER, BUSINESS WEEK: They did absolutely the right thing. If you had to choose between 10,000 parents e-mailing you or 10,000 pot smokers, I think I’d alienate the pot smokers. So I think they did the right thing.
O’REILLY: I’m not sure because they tell me after you smoke pot, you want to eat a lot of stuff.
BRADY: But you’re not terribly discriminative about what you eat, so I think…
You think pot smokers aren’t fiercely brand-loyal? Talk to Doritos, Hacky Sack, Billabong, the Grateful Dead, Spongebob Squarepants, jazz, Zig Zag, High Times, Volkswagen…. Have you seen Harold & Kumar and what hell they will endure to get a White Castle burger in a landscape littered with McDonald’s?
I’m kidding, of course; pot smokers are as diverse a group of consumers as dog owners. Yes, there are certain things we buy that nobody else does (lighter leashes, dog leashes) but outside our particular hobby, we are just like every other consumer out there. So the question isn’t whether stoners can resist the allure of Pop-Tarts; 1 out of 5 stoners I know in Portland are vegetarians who wouldn’t touch a Kellogg’s product with a ten foot organically farmed recyclable bamboo pole.
The question is this, Ms. Brady: 5,000 of those 10,000 parents have smoked pot themselves. 1,000 of them probably this year, and maybe 300 of them are smoking now. Is it smart for a company to come across as a finger-wagging moralist for behavior half its customers have engaged in themselves? Especially when that company is pushing junk food to incresingly obese children using cartoon mascots during Saturday morning programming. Does it make sense to drop the finest athletic role model chubby kids could have while you’re fattening them up?
I got more to say about this after the break, so…
O’REILLY: Ms. Brady says, Mr. Shankman, that middle America is really the target audience for these cereals, and they don’t want somebody who’s publicly been outted as a drug user on the package. Now that seems logical to me. Look, we’re looking at this — a little elf there. If a little elf had a syringe full of heroin, I don’t think he’s going to be on the cereal package.
SHANKMAN: If the little elf had a syringe full of heroin, it would be a lot harder for him to come out and apologize and just simply quit. The fact of the matter is that Kellogg’s made it a much, much bigger production that it would have been. I’d rather see the parents say, hey, you know what? Michael screwed up, but he admitted his mistake and we learned from it. I think that Kellogg’s banning him is going to come back to haunt him because in four years, he’s going to win another 50 gold medals. And then where’s he going to be?
Yes, because the Keebler Elf shooting up heroin is exactly what the image of Michael Phelps wearing eight gold medals on a Frosted Flakes box would conjure in the minds of the children. For God’s Sake Won’t Somebody Think Of The Children!
BRADY: So I think that they are perfectly within their rights. You know, Sharon Stone says bad karma for the Chinese, Christian Dior drops her. So this is what happens. This is, you know, Kobe Bryant, some endorsements…
O’REILLY: He lost a lot of endorsements after that.
BRADY: He lost, but some of them he kept.
Yes, because calling out a communist dictatorship for their shameful human rights abuses and committing adultery in a questionably consensual sexual act resulting in anal injuries and a rape charge is just like smoking a bong at a college frat house party.
When they’re playing the heroin card, it’s almost over.
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2 things that urked me about this, 10,000 parents are more important then 10,000 people that smoke ganja? People are people and should be considered equally important. 2nd when papa bear said if the elf had a heroin syringe,
Phelps was not using HEROIN!!!!