The Vita Coco pee jar was just another Brand Twitter stunt
Brands uh, really are going for it nowadays.
Vita Coco, for one, had us all screaming when they responded to a hater who tweeted that he'd rather drink their social media manager's pee than consume Vita Coco's coconut water. Instead of simply moving on, the company mustered up all its BDE and had a staffer urinate in a jar, post a photo of said pee, and ask for the hater's address.
How the hell did we get here?
While everyone on the internet was reeling from Pee Jar-gate, Vita Coco quietly launched a campaign to deal with internet hate. To promote their new product — which the company claims is "the first coconut water that tastes like coconut" and is made from pressed coconuts — Vita Coco reached out to the "most negative people on the internet" to try it out.
Heavily opinionated Twitter user Tony Posnanski took to the platform in March to share some hot takes nobody asked for, including an attack on coconut water. In yet another "unpopular opinions" post, he tweeted, "Coconut water is disgusting. Even if it is from a baby coconut."
Two months after making that post, Vita Coco had some words for Posnanaski, whose Twitter bio says he owns an "all you can eat egg restaurant."
"There is such a thing as too many eggs," Vita Coco responded, seemingly looking for a Twitter fight.
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Posnanski replied by once again asserting that coconut water is "fucking disgusting" and shared a 2014 article he wrote for the Huffington Post about how much he hated the beverage. Let's all just take a moment to appreciate the absolute passion in this writing:
So I bought a stupid green baby coconut and I did manage to open it. I drank the water. It was still gross. It tasted just like the nasty stuff I drank from the bottle. Except now I had coconut water all over my counter because opening a coconut is a pain.
OK. We get it. This guy truly despises coconut water.
Vita Coco says that they weren't in cahoots with Posnanski for the campaign, but that it was a matter of "just good timing."
"We launched our campaign today, and had planned to reach out to people who had said something negative about coconut water on Twitter to tell them about Pressed Coconut," they told Mashable through Twitter DM. "We found Tony, who had previously penned an article saying coconut water was disgusting, and reached out for him to try our new flavor."
But when Vita Coco offered to send him some in hopes of swaying him, Posnanski kept up the hate.
"I would rather drink your social media person's piss than coconut water," he spewed.
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Posnanski probably didn't expect Vita Coco to return with the same energy. The brand responded with a photo of someone — presumably a social media manager — standing in a bathroom stall, holding up a Vita Coco-branded jar of yellow liquid.
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This was all part of Vita Coco's "Impossible to Hate" campaign — according to a statement emailed to Mashable, the company is convinced that their new flavor is so good, not even Twitter trolls could hate it. As annoying as it is to admit that a brand's stunt is good, Vita Coco's pee jar stunt is pretty good.
How do you recover from that? Is there any witty response to someone literally peeing in a jar to fulfill your own pissed off (sorry) insult? Sure you dragged them, but at what cost?
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Vita Coco confirmed in a DM to Mashable that it really is pee in that jar. When we later followed up to ask if the marketing stunt meant that it the Pee Jar was fake, Vita Coco confirmed again that there was real urine in that jar.
When asked about whether it was only one person's urine in the jar, or a team effort, Vita Coco attributed the sheer volume of liquid to "unlimited coconut water in the office." They did not confirm whether only one person peed in the jar.
Even Twitter queen Chrissy Teigen took a side, standing for coconut water.
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Other Twitter users noted that although brand Twitter has an unfortunate tendency to be extra, Vita Coco really did go above and beyond in this social media stunt. Sure, IHOP tried to be quirky with its burger-themed name change, but can it really top this?
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That's it. Go home, everyone. Twitter is done for today. This may be part of an ad, but it's still a bold move for a brand to tweet a photo of someone holding a literal jar of pee.
UPDATE: May 15, 2019, 5:54 p.m. PDT Updated with details of Vita Coco's "Impossible to Hate" campaign.
