The recipient of this month's uncoveted "Wet Blanket" award goes to Mott's for their mystifying new campaign for apple juice.

Marcia Cross is their new pitchwoman. Oddly enough, this celebrity mom is pictured not with her own adorable twin daughters, but with someone else's redhead kids. So that leaves us to imagine Ms. Cross in her other public personna: that of the gun-toting, OCD-suffering Bree Hodge from Desperate Housewives, hardly the association Mott's was going for. In advertising, using a spokesperson is called "borrowed interest," yet Mott's has failed to borrow the right kind of interest.

What's more: the ad offers a Wake-Up Call from Marcia Cross to anyone who signs up at Motts.com. Doing so requires a rather lengthy registration, including supplying your full birthdate, a password, and identifying your gender. Call me pessimistic, but this smacks of mom list-building, cloaked behind the stated mission of donating $1 per call to feeding America. What's even stranger is that you get to choose the time of your wake-up call, from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., supply the name and phone number of the person you want called, yet this recorded message will never identify you as the sender. So, for the $1 donation, Mott's gets to call your Aunt Sue, your dog walker, or your old college roommate -- possibly rousing them from sleep -- yet never letting on that they've got you to thank for this intrusion.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for ending hunger. But this campaign feels off on so many levels and I suspect that moms everywhere -- whose "authenticity" radars are honed daily by the crafy ways of their very own icecream-seeking kids -- will call this for what it is: a rotten apple.

Labels: Feed America, Marcia Cross, Mott's Apple Juice

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