Yoghurt advertisements are the funniest thing on TV. First, they are marketed almost exclusively to women – apparently those of us with a Y chromosome are not deemed by the marketing gurus to delight in fermented milk and fruit chunks with quite the same enthusiasm as the fairer sex. Second is the sheer creativity and variety that they manage to apply to marketing what is a fairly standard product.
But my favourite yoghurt marketing technique of all is the super-pseudo-scientific Patented Proprietary Probiotic Cultures – the glorious amalgamations of biological jargon and pseudo-Latin, such as Activia’s “Bifidus Actiregularis” or “L. casei Defensis”. These names, carefully crafted in the bowels of some advertising agency, are calculated to suggest that what you’re getting is the latest in Yoghurt Technology – when in actuality it is merely a proprietary strain of the same bacteria you will find in any yoghurt.
But why should big food companies be having all the fun? Why can’t you and I have our own patented organisms, too? I think we can. And in order to facilitate this, I have created the Proprietary Probiotic Culture Generator. Click the button below to get your own name – perfect for over-hyping any bacteria-based food products you may wish to market in the future!
(Warning: due to Microsoft’s terrible support for open web standards, the above link may not render properly in Internet Explorer)
Though I doubt this will be of any use to anyone, as a matter of principle the source-code for this generator is available here, under the terms of the GNU-GPL v3.
