For reasons unclear to me, I received a box of Mother energy drink cans in the post from a PR company last week. They were accompanied by a flyer/media release, titled “Mother: New Taste, Double the energy kick*” with a footnote explaining that this was compared to a 250ml can of the old Mother. (The new cans being 500ml each, this is hardly surprising.)
The release said:
OK, we admit it! What were we thinking when we made Mother taste so damn awful? Turns out no-one liked the taste of Mother so we’ve hunted down the idiots that concocted the vile potion and ‘processed’ them accordingly to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.
It continued along the same lines, mentioning gonads at least once in each paragraph:
It tastes nothing like the old one, so man up, grow some balls and take the challenge!
New Mother – it’s here, it’s got double the kick* and it’s got balls – do you?
To prove you’ve got the balls to handle the new Mother…
The copy on the can was presumably churned out by the same pseudo-hipster idiots who wrote the phoney aren’t-we-cool-and-casual blurbs on Glaceau VitaminWater, another Coca Cola product. The can says:
Warning! High caffeine content… OK, we know that’s why you’re drinking it, but our lame legal guys made us warn you not to feed this to kids, up the duff women or the weak who just can’t tolerate it.
The can makes several other references to testicles and masculinity as well as clarifying that the new formula tastes nothing like the old one.
So evidently the target market for this product is constantly masturbating retarded 14-year-old boys. None of whom read the magazine I edit, which makes the PR exercise highly questionable.
And the new taste?
Utterly, utterly foul. Really vile.
But at least there’s more of it!
