While the long primary campaign may have exhausted candidates and voters alike, Madison Avenue is busy rolling out politically themed ads, sometimes lifting incidents straight from the campaign trail.

Though the point is to position their brands as hip and current, advertisers do take some risks when they delve into politics not just of offending people’s partisan views, but of coming off as silly or awkward.

After all, what flies on Comedy Central may fall flat on a billboard or website.

Unilever, which makes the margarine spread I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, is about to introduce a series of six webisodes in which the female cartoon mascot for its spray version, Spraychel, runs for president.

The series starts on Monday, when the character announces her campaign.

Although she is running for president of the refrigerator, Spraychel’s experiences on the campaign trail bear an eerie resemblance to those of Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In one webisode, her opponent, Maxwell Butterman, is accused of exaggerating the danger of his trip to visit refugees (though in real life, it was Clinton, not her opponent, who was criticised for her description of a trip to Bosnia). Butterman’s trip was to the freezer because Bosnia “does not exist in the fridge,” said Javier Martin, senior brand manager for I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.

Spraychel (rhymes with Rachel) also argues with Butterman about global warming (refrigerator warming, in this case) and encounters edible versions of real people, like Howard Dean and Ross Perot.

The original plans included Tim Russert, but the company will change the character because of Russert’s sudden death last week. Martin said Unilever had a year ago timed the Spraychel webisodes for early summer to promote the product’s use at barbecues, and that the plan was to move forward with an election-themed campaign no matter what was going on in real-world politics.

“Obviously,we didn’t know what would happen during the primaries,” Martin said. “We didn’t know exactly what mishappenings would occur, but we knew some would occur.”

He said that Unilever had also considered a story line based on the Rev Jeremiah A Wright Jr, the pastor whose inflammatory remarks prompted Sen Barack Obama to renounce him, but had decided against it.

“You don’t want to offend anybody,” Martin said, adding, “We had one making fun of Bill Clinton and his affair in the Oval Office, but consumers told us, ‘ain’t funny.’ So we took it out.”

Unilever’s digital media agency is Story Worldwide, which has created all the Spraychel campaigns. “It’s margarine,” said Stacy Thomson, the agency’s director of marketing services. “It’s not the easiest thing to make exciting and sexy, and we’re really proud that we can.”

Spraychel’s first webisodes were introduced in 2005, when she starred in a mock soap opera, Sprays of Her Life; the series drew about 2,50,000 visitors over five weeks. The two subsequent series included a riff last year on Sex and the City called Sprays in the City, which attracted about a million visitors.

Martin said that Unilever liked the webisodes because each one is longer than a television commercial, and people actually choose to view them, unlike TV spots.

“The longer they interact with the brand, the more likely they will be to purchase the brand,” he said.This time, the character will have a campaign website, VoteSpraychel.com, with features that were inspired by Clinton’’ s website, Martin said.

There will be polls, a map of her standing (segmented by refrigerator section rather than by state) and a Facebook group. For six weeks, Unilever will release a new webisode weekly along with a new casual game.

Source : DNA