Hot Pockets and the Eat Freely Marketing Campaign

Advertising has officially reached a new level of absurdity.

While I was walking in Manhattan last night, a poster caught my eye. It was an advertisement, split into two images (see photo, above; click on photo for more detail). I assumed the pictures were part of the same ad since they were written in the same font and both contained a small red box with the URL “EatFreely.org.”

Written on the left photo—which showed a woman simultaneously playing tennis and holding a foodlike item—was the phrase “Winners eat on the go. Losers stay put.” Being that I cook and eat 95 percent of my meals at home, I felt like a caveman in a GEICO commercial.

The right portion of the poster had the phrase “Live a cheesy, crispy, mobile life” superimposed on something resembling food. In addition, there was a small photo of a box of Hot Pockets, a product of Nestlé (see photo, left). Could this hipsterish ad be part of a larger marketing campaign?

My suspicions were confirmed when I went home, logged onto my computer and visited the EatFreely.org site. This is a definite “you have to see it to believe it” moment. There is patriotic music, (faux) videos, graphics and merchandise for sale, all in the name of eating freely, or more to the point, selling as many Hot Pockets as possible.

This ad campaign is utterly asinine. It attempts to make eating heavily-processed food on the go cool, while stereotyping eating at a table as something only blue-hairs do.

One more thing: save your energy and don’t even bother looking for an ingredient list on the EatFreely and Hot Pockets websites. Grandma has a better chance of running down the corporate villain in one of the EatFreely.org videos than we do of finding out what is in a Hot Pocket.