If you weren’t watching this year’s Super Bowl, or if you weren’t watching the ads, you missed South Korean hip hop artist PSY doing his Gangnam Style dance with a bunch of life-sized Wonderful Pistachios, shilling for Paramount Farms. (If the dance moves look suggestive to you, well, where have you been? “Crack your nuts now.”)
Rumor is that airtime for Super Bowl ads can run to $4 million, and then there’s the bill for the talent, which couldn’t have been cheap, given PSY’s worldwide popularity. But if even half the people watching ran out and bought one of those bags of Wonderful Pistachios now on display in grocery stores, the Resnicks would easily cover the cost.
We’d suggest that pistachio lovers boycott the Wonderful brand, but it’s getting hard to find any other brand to buy, isn’t it? Delta water seems to be subsidizing a Resnick pistachio monopoly. Paramount killed the 26-year-old California Pistachio Commission in 2007, controlling the crop and therefore the vote.