Corporate America

I think Corporate America is a strange place. No, not the economically obsessive, drive to succeed part of Corporate America, (though that is all quite odd as well...); no I mean the part of Corporate America that responds thusly to emails from consumers.

From: SonicPR@Sonicdrivein.com
Subject: RE: Not so Cran-tastic...
Date: August 28, 2007 4:22:28 PM EDT
To: revjjo@mac.com

Jim,
Thanks for the observation, I will forward this on to our advertising
department for review.

-----Original Message-----
From: James Olson [mailto:revjjo@mac.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 18, 2007 7:04 PM
To: Sonic PR
Subject: Not so Cran-tastic...

Dear Friends:

We love the goofy ad where two people are sitting in a car, and the
man is going on about his cran-mother, cran-t, cran-versations, etc.

The last seconds of the ad show a beautiful, dew-kissed cranberry
dropping off a branch and into one of the cranberry drinks.

One little problem...cranberries don't grown on trees, they grow
close to the ground in bogs. In the fall, the bogs are flooded and
the ripe cranberries are paddled and then float to the top.

Just an observation, not really a complaint!

Jim Olson
Boston, MA

***

Now, admittedly, I was being goofy in even sending the email in the first place; I am sure that Sonic, Inc. neither knows or cares that cranberries grow in bogs and not on trees. But two things strike me as odd. First, that nooned checked this in the first place, and that noone caught this small but important error. And second, that I may have just cost Sonic a whole lot of money while they pull the ad, re-tool the last couple of seconds of it, and then re-release it as part of their advertisement campaign. I appreciate that someone at Sonic even took the time to respond to me, but even that is odd, and, in Corporate America, cost money somewhere.

All of this would have been unnecessary if someone at Sonic had known that cranberries grow on the ground.

Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.