The Bat Guano's SwaG! Radio Program

“Grow Your Own” ad for Consumer Brands Association

If, like me, you stream on the cheap, you start to see some of the same ads over and over.

This one has plagued my viewing of late. It’s from Consumer Brands Association (CBA), which “champions growth and innovation for the industry whose products consumers depend on every day,” mainly by lobbying for the consumer packaged goods industry, a multitrillion segment of the U.S. economy. Basically, all the stuff you buy at the supermarket and megastore. Their board comprises CEOs and C-suite type from, inter alia, Conagra, Nestlé, Clorox, PepsiCo. So, you know consumer well-being is their paramount consideration.

They’ve decided to flood the airwaves with this ad. Now, as we know, they’re all about Innovation. And what says "innovation" more forcefully than AI’ing tf out of their ad? Because the blond “women” throughout the ad hoisting poultry are immediately identifiable as AI slop, as is the bug-eyed brunette near the start, with her meticulously rendered eyelashes and skin texture.

But the absolute dead giveaway is the little girl at 00:13 who looks like she was rendered by the hungover intern; this child, who is, apparently, seriously jonesing for a hit, can't manage to stand still or hold an expression without glitching and twitching. She’s the poster child for Uncanny Valley, U.S.A.I.

The shittiness and creepiness of the visuals utterly overshadow the vapid messaging, but, beyond that, CBA’s willingness to use craptastic AI tells the viewer that the organization also has zero respect for the human actors they otherwise would’ve had to have paid to appear. Because I find it hard to imagine that the Big Concept—women with chickens perched on them to somehow illustrate the absurdity of growing one’s own food instead of buying a frozen pizza—was compelling enough to require these amateurish AI graphics.

The real headline is that the chucklefucks at the CBA fear influencer culture and the loss of the youth market so much they felt compelled to produce a panicky ad to convince people to buy packaged food instead of growing their own.

Bobby Gets Hep #nn (Bell Telephone System, 1946)

In the era of party lines when multiple households would share one phone line, it was important not to keep the line tied up with lengthy chitchat! Hence this promotional comic.