Stock Photos for Clickbait Ads Now Account for More Than Half of US Banana Sales
By Jeff Mosier
In a bold move, stock photographers who provide photos of bananas for clickbait ads have become the primary consumers of bananas in the United States, accounting for more than half of all US sales in 2019.
Carlos Garcia, head of global marketing for the Chiquita Banana Company, attributes a dramatic boost in sales to ludicrous internet ads promoting patently fraudulent health supplements and diet plans, almost exclusively through the use of banana photos. “We’ve all seen those weird ads that show a bunch of nasty brown bananas in a greasy skillet with a caption like, ‘Stop Eating This NOW,’” Garcia said. “And yes, that does turn some people off to our product. But the enormous number of bananas used in shooting the photos more than offsets the loss in sales that results from these disgusting images.”
“I get a cargo container full of bananas trucked directly to my studio once a week,” said California-based photographer Terry Brownstone, who estimates that he’s spent more than $40,000 on bananas in the past year in his work for various clickbait scam sites. “I’ve shot big bananas, little bananas, cooked bananas, raw bananas, peeled bananas, unpeeled bananas, half-peeled bananas, bananas in vats of oil, bananas smeared with Vegemite, dogs eating bananas, cats eating bananas, bananas with bugs crawling on them, bananas lovingly arranged on a bed of orchid petals, you name it. I haven’t shot this many bananas since I worked for a porno mag in the Seventies.”
“It’s crazy,” said Browstone. “I’ve seen the same damn banana photo captioned with both, ‘Doctors Say This Fruit Will Kill You,’ and ‘Flush Your Bowels By Eating This One Food Every Day.’ Honestly, I don’t care if either of these things is true as long the checks don’t bounce.”
Chiquita executive Garcia was equally non-committal, declining to offer an opinion on whether bananas were a belly-fat-blasting superfood or a toxic cancer bomb for your pancreas. “It doesn’t matter. Fact is, there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Garcia shrugged. “Our focus is solely on making sure that stock photographers continue to battle each other for the last bunch at the grocery store. The avocado industry is coming hard for this market, so we’re grateful to the clickbait scammers for keeping the banana buzz going.”
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