AdWatch: Lurpak can't butter us up

In the latest Adwatch: Lurpak fail to butter us up; Galaxy helps Britain dumb down; Aero gets sick, dude; and KFC come over all River Cottage. Yes, really.

Last time around on Adwatch - Word of Mouth's (almost) monthly review of the dark arts of food advertising - I tried to lighten the mood, and got nowt but bile in return. This month, you will be pleased to know, there will be no such frivolity. There is some right old baloney on the box, so, let's all take a good deep breath, and, 1, 2, 3 ... vent that spleen.

Given the recent Flora Buttery debacle, you might have thought that our butter manufacturers would think better of making similarly wild and unsubstantiated claims - albeit about British behavioural norms, rather than the product - but not Lurpak.

Saturday is breakfast day? Is it? Really? Now, personally, I am usually so busy celebrating, "the death of the week", on a Friday night that, come Saturday morning, I can't face anything more strenuous than two Alka-Seltzer and a glass of water. If I'm not hungover, there will be work to do, banks and shops to get to, a rush to get to the pub before football, floors to hoover. I've even heard that some people - let's call them, parents - don't have five seconds on a Saturday morning, for shuttling small humans from swimming to dance classes to Disney On Ice.

Despite the industry love-in going on at ad agency Wieden & Kennedy's blog, and at Campaign's website, you, I and everybody else on Word of Mouth knows that Sunday is, in fact, breakfast day. The day when, even if you're crawling from beneath the duvet nearer noon than 9am, you might be of a mind, and freedom, to whip up some decent scrambled eggs; a croque-monsieur; even follow Rutger Hauer's suggestion, of pancakes.

The bigger question, perhaps, is will you be using Lurpak? As mass market butter goes, it's not bad, blandly inoffensive, but if your toast - "a granary canvas for a million toppings" - really deserves the best, then you need something seriously good 'n' creamy, like this. Anything less, would be like asking Matisse to work with a tin of all-purpose white emulsion.

Talking of corporations spending millions of pounds in an attempt to generate some ersatz common experience around their product: am I the only person in Britain who doesn't, viz Galaxy's Irresistible Reads promotion, eat anything, much less chocolate, while I read? I'm not one who reveres books as objects - spines are bent, pages turned over, covers get creased - but even I realise that if you eat (uniquely claggy, unpalatable) Galaxy whilst reading, you will just end up with sticky finger prints all over the shop. You might argue that rendering the books that Galaxy is giving away unreadable - a John Grisham; something called The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy, Katie Price's Crystal - is a social service, but, still, the whole thing is nonsense.

At least Aero recognise that they have an, essentially, flawed product - when they say 'bubbles', they mean an absence of chocolate, and who wants that? - with all the street cred of mint humbugs. It needs a serious, whizz-bang image overhaul, and one that makes low-to-no claim as to the product's quality. It's honesty of a sort. The answer? Rope in a Brazilian pro-skater, Bob Burnquist, who nobody over 25 should have heard of, fill a San Jose skate park with 50,000 brown balloons, sit back, and watch as Britain's teenage boys flock (36,000 views and rising) to the site you have created on YouTube.

And finally, News at Ten-style, just time for one last funny. No, not a dog on a surfboard, something even more remarkable than that: Kentucky Fried Chicken trying to emphasise their reliance on fresh produce and artisan cooking skills. This combined with the recent announcement that they are introducing grilled chicken to American outlets could see the fast-food giants moving into new (and considerably less greasy) territory.

Reader, you have the floor. Is breakfast day Saturday or Sunday? Could you keep a bar of Galaxy down whilst reading The Undomestic Goddess? Is Aero chocolate's most pointless product? Will discerning consumers flock to KFC now they know that the company uses - and how's this for provenance, people? - "the same Grade A chicken from the UK's leading suppliers that you find in the best supermarkets"?

Or, to put it another way, if I do fancy a Zinger Tower burger (although, I'm more of a very infrequent Burger King man, myself), must we go through this farce of pretending it is some healthy, gourmet product? Can't I just have my guilty pleasure in peace?