My recent encounter with lolbananas reminded me of a brief craze a few years ago for third-party advertising on fruit. In the late summer and autumn of 1998, ABC ran ads on bananas (including ones destined for Canada), while Global covered the local apple market. CBS ran ads on eggs a couple of years ago but third-party advertising on food still seems pretty limited, especially considering how ubiquitous it is elsewhere in daily life.
Amusingly, “Global’s got it” has been immortalized as a brand of fruit on the web site of a German fruit sticker collector.
Incidentally, I regard the pictures in this post as perfect justification for being a packrat, both digital and analog. Somehow, I knew that I’d have some use for these dumb labels in the future. The scan of the banana label has migrated along with the rest of my data through ten years, having originated two scanners, four computers, and at least eight hard drives ago. Similarly, the negative for the apple picture has been sitting in my archives for all that time, waiting until today for me to scan it. But I don’t keep absolutely everything: Risa should be thankful that I don’t have the actual 10-year-old apples and bananas still hanging around in my collection.