By Jasen Liu

On March 1st, 2021, Chobani released a 30 second animated TV spot as part of a broader advertising campaign to signal their diversification from their signature Greek yogurt to other foods and beverages such as oat milk, coffee, probiotic drinks, etc. Rather than choosing to extol the quality or the environmental friendliness of these products, the company instead chose to present a world where those products, and you, belong.

The ad is titled “Dear Alice”, and the narration is framed as a letter from a mother passing ownership of her farm to her daughter. A day in their life on the farm is shown as the mother reminds her daughter that “a business is only as good as the people who make it up”. However, the farm depicted is far less of an industrial farm that supplies a business like Chobani and more a life of self-sufficient subsistence farming. [MJ1] [JL2] [JL3] After all, in the same breath, the mother says that the farm will “feed you forever”.

Either that, or the subtext is that the advertisement commentary on our world, telling the viewer, that if you care for it (by buying Chobani products ostensibly), it will bring you the life you desire.

Is this overanalyzing? Yes. Is it also important to consider how a corporation might conceptualize its target audience to guide its specific marketing choices? Also yes.

 Every aspect of this advertisement appears chosen to appeal to a Millennial and Gen Z audience. The world is dotted with wind turbines on balloons and solar panels on barnhouse rooftops. There’s no highway in sight, as automobile transportation has been eliminated in favor of exhaustless flying vehicles. Even the distant city bends to nature by design, eschewing rectangular angles for curved surfaces and steel and glass for vertically integrated greenery. This is a solarpunk future where humanity has found a way to coexist and literally support nature, a utopia that is intentionally appealing to a set of young viewers more climate-conscious than ever before.

This world also appeals aesthetically to the target consumer, and not by just looking very green. The vibrant colors, focus on nature, and soft character designs invoke nostalgia for Ghibli movies of the 1990s (think Spirited Away) that millennials and Gen Z would have seen as children. That isn’t merely a vague impression; long-time Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi composed the music for this advertising campaign. The animation studio for this advertisement, The Line, knew what they were doing.           

But perhaps what is most important is not the world, but the family itself. The narration may be about Alice and her mother, but the advertisement shows a whole multigenerational, multiracial family bonding together over Chobani-branded food. Not only is this advertisement promising a world where climate change is “solved”, but also one where racial inequality, bigotry, and generational conflict has disappeared as well. This family’s dinner, and this hopeful world, brought to you by Chobani.

The message that eating some Greek yogurt will bring about utopia is inherently ludicrous, but there are people who will unironically say this. The push for personal environmental responsibility by managing one’s “carbon footprint”, recycling your waste, and of course, consuming environmentally-friendly foods, has always a deft means of ignoring the far more impactful environmental damage corporations cause that no individual consumer can undo. Nonetheless, consumerism in the name of environmental [JL4] consciousness is simultaneously profit for a firm like Chobani. Alice’s farm thus paradoxically both represents the “ideal” individual consumer and the business standing in for Chobani, avoiding acknowledging a separate corporate responsibility.

The advertisement also assumes that technological advancement is reconcilable, if not necessary, for environmental preservation. If we just get wheels off the grass and stop pumping smoke into the sky, things will be solved. That’s just not reality. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 Report back in 2014, if all emissions had stopped then, average global temperatures would have still risen by around 0.6 °C before beginning to fall. Our future climate is simply not the binary choice this advertisement portrays it as. 

Finally, the advertisement’s “care for future generations” moral falls on jaded ears, tired of hearing such posturing only for older generations to not take action. It’s unfortunate to note that by making Alice and immediate family people of color to reinforce this video’s inclusive vision, it ignores the fact that the burden of responsibility for today’s climate crisis falls on predominantly white industrialists, far removed from us by time or relation.

This is not a critique of Chobani as an actual company, and especially not the creatives who made this advertisement. However, it will never cease to be fascinating how, as corporate marketers seek to co-opt the younger generation’s desire to protect their future, they seem to misunderstand their perspective entirely.