On the way home in the car yesterday Drew asked me if we'd covered much of food advertising regulations in my course last year.. because he wanted to know if it was similar as say Nike not being able to advertise their shoes as being handmade by someone in a workshop or similar.. when it would be clearly a big huge fat lie. He then went on to say because the new steggles ad...
I saw this ad a few days ago. I was given the same impression as andrew, the same impression as everyone would get (but not everyone is able to see through so easily) so steggles are now free-range?? Or rather, using the vague ambiguity of meat chicken housing to confuse people into thinking they are free range. I don't know much about advertising and marketing, but it's pretty obvious what's going on here. It sucks that stuff like this is allowed to go on, I know it's not the first. But steggles new quality campaign is a perfect example. I especially like the broiler farm lady at the end... "no, there's no cages in our sheds" and then a cut to a shed that's obviously had half the chickens removed from it and some pretty ones put in, with lots of straw on the ground. As one of the readers commented at the bottom of the campaign article:
"Anyone who's ever seen the inside of a filthy, squalid chicken factory knows there aren't "cages" inside them.
What it is, is a huge metal box with artificial sunlight 18 hours a day (so they grow quicker), and so little space for the chickens to move around in, that they actually don't. So their entire lives are spent inside a metal box, with no room to move, being artificially fattened-up for slaughter.
Sure, there may be no cages inside the factory. That's because the factory is one big squalid overcrowded cage.
This is a grossly unethical campaign, and its creators (and the client) should be ashamed of that "no cages" component. They know they're bending the truth to breaking-point. And they do our industry a great disservice as a result."
Overall - the romanticism of intensive farming really really upsets me. So good on you steggles.
rad. thanks for posting this. it's what people should be talking about more often, although i had no idea what steggles are and had to go look it up.
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