EZCracker

While watching the Olympics the other day I saw the best "as seen on TV" kind of ad for an off-the-wall product: the EZCracker. Its a small mechanism that cracks eggs for you. Go ahead, click the link and watch the ad on the website so that you can understand power and utility of such a device.

Before I skewer this ad, I must say it clearly has a use. If you lack motor control for whatever reason, find getting some egg on your hand is unbearable, or like having kitchen gadgets, then this product is for you. In fact, the egg-separator is particularly ingenious and though I don't need to separate eggs often, this would be much faster than doing it by hand.

But seriously. Do we all struggle with cracking eggs so much that a device like this is needed? Like I said there are probably people out there who could use such a product, like maybe older people who have lost the fine motor control they once had. These are not the people in the ad, though, and thus are presumably not the target audience for this device. No, the people in the add are the most aggressive egg crackers I have ever seen. Eggs are known to be fragile and yet when trying to break them open they seem to be using a rather large degree of force.

And how about the consequences of eating a baked good with a bit of egg-shell in at as portrayed in the ad? You would think this gal hand stumbled across some raw chicken liver or perhaps a small fish head in her muffin by the look of disgust on her face. When cleaning up eggs that you were trying to get in the pan but somehow entirely missed, it looks like the gal is just kind of swishing them around on the stove-top rather than actually wiping them up. Who are these people?

The king of un-usefulness, though, goes to the "but wait, there's more" product: the EZScrambler. No more mixing eggs in a bowl, you can now do it right in the eggshell. Again, do we really need a device like this in our lives? Is is so hard to clean a bowl and mixing utensil that we'd rather buy a gadget?

This is why I hate marketing. Though there is clearly a market for this device, it is much smaller than the ad is trying to reach. This is the heart of marketing; creating a demand for a product that most people probably don't need. Its phony and manipulative and I wish it weren't so apparently effective; if it weren't we wouldn't have ads for the EZCracker on TV.