VIDEO: 25 Sticks of Butter Later, Accolades for Ad

Monday, 27 June 2011 | by Pat's Picks

Warning: this video is disgusting. But that didn’t stop the Minneapolis Star Tribune from proudly claiming it as a Minnesota original. The Twin Cities YMCA won a national award for their butter lover commercial earlier this month, prompting the paper to take a closer look at the gross but memorable ad. Apparently, the actress had to munch her way through 25 sticks of butter before getting it right. She was allowed to spit it out between takes but estimates she took down about two whole sticks during the filming. Gross. Turns out, the premise of the ad was not to kill the nation’s appetite for butter altogether—it was an attempt to boost membership levels. Explains an ad executive who worked on the project: “We did research and found that people on average gain four to seven pounds during the holidays, so we went right to the base source of that weight gain: butter.”