Australian Ad Warns that Avocado Makes You 'Pretentious'

Australia has a tumultuous relationship with the avocado.

On one hand, avocado production is a massive industry for the country, with more than 70 percent of Aussie households having purchased the fruit in 2016, generating hundreds of millions of AUDs every year from almost 66,000 tonnes of production. On the other hand (dare we say the knife-bludgeoned avocado hand), Australia has become the land of avocado lattes, large-scale avocado thefts, and browning-prevention avocado time machines.

For fear of become an "international laughing stock," a growing backlash against avocado hysteria now has advertisers taking it upon themselves to make PSAs warning of the dangers of #avocadolife.

According to the industry magazine AdLife, ad agencies have been mounting a PR war against the fatty fruit, and viewers of the hit show Gruen—which is about advertising—were on the front lines. When agencies H&T and Red Engine made their pitch videos to squash avocado growth, the results were sobering stats and a biting indictment of Millennials.

In the Red Engine ad, we see twenty-somethings brunching on avocado toast while taking selfies in full, culturally insensitive Native American headdress. Later, consumers in a mock grocery store peruse "tree turds" covered with warning labels like "You're not an artist," "You're not blessed," and "Avocados lead to pretentiousness."

"We did some more research and discovered there are over half a million mentions of avocado toast on Instagram," the creators of the video told AdLife. "An 'avocaderia' has opened in Brooklyn. And Gwyneth Paltrow is a mad avo fan.

"We realized the issue was not our country's future wealth, but our future as a nation of pretentious wankers. The creative team came up with the idea of imitating the warnings on cigarette packaging and creating new avocado warning labels to combat and prevent parents from raising try-hard food blogger hipster kids."

H&T, for its part, went the hard stats route, pointing to the avocado's high fat content, calling it "richly bland," and blaming avocados for preventing Millennials from buying a house. As far as PSAs from PR agencies go, these are about as aggressive as it gets, and a testament to the growing cultural eye-roll that underlies them.

But thanks to Australian scientists who just cracked the code on how to grow 20,000 avocado plants in a 100-square-foot room, it doesn't look like "tree turds" are going anywhere—no matter how annoying it may be when they clog up your Instagram feed.