Masterfoods got a p.r. boost last week when Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream was recovered in Oslo, Norway, two years after it had been stolen.
Just days earlier, Masterfoods offered a tongue-in-cheek reward of 2 million dark-chocolate M&Ms for the return of the painting. Masterfoods features The Scream—with Red, one of the brand’s characters, superimposed in the background, playing hopscotch—in ads using the tagline “Dark just got fun.”
Masterfoods will honor the offer if Oslo police, who recovered the painting, want to take the company up on it. That’s 40,000 single-serve bags of M&Ms, about $22,000 worth.
The reward is one piece of the August launch of M&Ms Dark Chocolate candies as a permanent SKU. Hackettstown, NJ-based Masterfoods first debuted dark-chocolate M&Ms as part of its 2005 tie-in with Star Wars, the Chocolate M-Pire. That prompted 30,000 consumer requests for a permanent version of dark-chocolate candies.
Network
