Smint: Anything but fresh

Strap on ye' mining helmets, and flick on ye' torches—we be salt mining today ladies and gentlemen!

I'm salty, and Smint are the cause for this!
Oh Smint, why must you betray me like this; I had such faith in you!
Your slogan is 'Fresh to Impress' though you are neither fresh, and I am not impressed!
Yours, Salty McSalterson

So as you may have known, I entered a Smint poster competition, and myself and Shona (A University Compadré) lead in the votes, neither of us actually won, as the votes were totally discounted, leaving us both in the 25 runners up category—this of course entitled us to some free smint goodies, to help soak up the tears of the money we could have won.

I believe Shona may have actually come in the top three, entitling her to £250, but I can't fully remember, but I'm sure they'll  be sending over some small mints to her either way. So if you look below, you'll see what I received in the mail today. (The cat was not included)

The cat tries her best to get into every photo I take

Above are the spoils of my entry, 4 packets of smints. One regular pack, one fruity pack, one regular pack in a 3D sleeve and a slightly larger packet. And with this amount of small mints you may think that I'll have fresh breathe for the rest of my life, but there is a catch! Half of them are out of date!

How long have these been on the shelf? They are solid sugar tablets, how can they even exprire? Nevermind that, some of them expired 13 months ago. Do you understand how old sugar must be to expire, in a sealed container? #freshmyarse

If you can't quite tell, that says November 2014. 13 months in the past.

So, we've established that the Smint products aren't fresh, but what about the brand, are they fresh? Are their ideas fresh? Yes and no. Their ideas will be fresh because they just got 300+ pieces of spec work, to work and play with the ideas as they so wish. They also just paid £500 for a national Ad Campaign and Poster Design, so their Christmas bonuses will likely be pretty fresh too, because they've just scammed a bunch of students.

But do you know what isn't fresh? This idea. They've run it before, and they'll run it again. Looking through their back catalogue of branding and campaigns, it's mostly a mixture of boring branding, lack-luster campaigns and bloody rubbish slogans. So they'll stick on their caps, throw this idea back into the pot next year and land themselves in the same place.

Thanks for the freebies guys, and good luck in the future, but there are a lot of expired mints in Cumbria this December.

Merry Smint-mas!