Prego—Yes, the Spaghetti Sauce Brand—Is Launching a Dinnertime Voice Recorder

Here's an oddity from the world of tech-forward marketing: Prego, the pasta and jarred sauce company, is partnering with a "story company" called StoryCorps to release a limited run of $20 "Connection Keeper" voice recorders for the dinner table.

Let's unpack that.

Despite sounding like a military unit full of authors, StoryCorps is a non-profit that has been in operation since 2003. It's focused on archiving people's voices and conversations, though the purpose of this is a little vague; their website is full of copy like, "Honor the spaces that hold stories that shape us."

Prego has a longstanding marketing position around family, pushing the idea that eating together builds the warm, nostalgic connections we think about when choosing a jar of vodka sauce. A marketer presumably free-associated from this starting point to the idea of dinner-table conversation, and an idea was born.

StoryCorps has a ...