We all love and hate Buzzfeed, to various extents. The community is mostly link-bait lists, with the occasionally in-depth post. And Copyranter is pretty cool.
But the very structure of Buzzfeed — a community with an insatiable hunger for new content, and upvoting by members, makes it vulnerable to organized political takeover.
And that's what has apparently happened with the "personhoodusa" account. Political posts like 8 "Outrageous Things Planned Parenthood Was Caught Doing" and "5 Incredible Videos Of Life In The Womb" are appearing in the stream alongside "27 Everyday Decisions That Twentysomethings Are Really Bad At Making" and "The Spiedie Is A Perfect And Important Sandwich".
I'm sure Buzzfeed is just trying to stay out of anything serious, but considering they have a dedicated LGBT section, people might have assumed they were pretty progressive. Now that the anti-abortion posts are starting to cause some blowback, it will be interesting to see how they respond.
The Disney Store is selling Avengers t-shirts for women with the slogan "I Need a Hero" and "I Only Kiss Heroes," and an Iron Man t-shirt for boys that reads "Be a Hero." This sends a harmful message about who can and cannot be a leader in this world. These shirts promote the idea that men and boys are meant to do the saving, and that women and girls are the ones who need to be saved.
This is from a Change.org petition by MissRepresentation.org. They are, quite understandably, pissed off at the primitive sexism.
Ironically, Marvel comics has a long history of including (at least token) strongwomensuperheroes in the original comic series. Even the movie includes Black Widow.
FCKH8.com is one of the many causes I follow on Facebook. They're a pretty in-your-face LGBT advocacy group, originally formed to fight California's homophobic Prop 8 with joyful profanity.
I was a little disappointed at this tactic, however.
KATY PERRY: "I am a gay activist & I say that proudly. I voted no on Prop 8, of course. I definitely believe in equality." ♥ 10% Off "STR8 Against H8" & "Chicks Marry Chicks" Tees, Tanks & Hoodies w/ Code "LOVE" @ http://FCKH8.com/"LIKE" the Cause on FB FCKH8.com
Here's the thing. FCKH8 are fighting the good fight. But using other people's work — and other people's likenesses — without permission is not cool. Especially when you're using their sexuality to sell your own t-shirts.
The infamous Ukrainian anarcho-feminist movement, known for protesting topless agains prostitution, corruption and misogyny, now have a new target: admen.
Fiat dishonestly uses image of femen activists in advertising campaign to promote their product at the Latin American market. Brazilian advertisers use recognizable attributes of the women's movement femen in their video without our consent. We believe such action against us is unfair.
Have a look for yourself (it's in Portuguese):
It sure seems "inspired" by Femen, who also have an active chapter in Brazil. In addition to co-opting their concept, the ad also wimps out on the nudity, then undermines their ideals by having them women gleefully jump into the man's car at the end.
This wouldn't be the first time a grassroots, anti-system movement was co-opted by the very "Man" they oppose. But note that Femen don't seem to be attempting any legal action, just social complaint.
Considering that social media played such a huge part in inspiring Americans to vote for President Obama in 2008, I was wondering what 2012 would be like. After all, the landscape has changed.
It's a nice little movement, perfectly in tune with the sensibilities of Millennial voters. Called "a vote for all" (which contrasts nicely with Senator Romney's "47%" fiasco), it features Barrack Obama's Instagram account putting out a call to young voters:
Why are you voting for Barack Obama? Share your photo and your reason using #ForAll, then head to vote.barackobama.com.
If there are three things that define the young generation, it's colleboration, taking pictures of themselves and their surroundings, and telling people what they're up to at all times. Since Instagram (now owned by Facebook) allows them to do all three, it's a natural fit.
Plus, it has celebrity endorsers.
Besides Natalie Portman and Ms. Alba, apparently Scarlett Johansson and Jared Leto have also Tweeted their support.
Will this slacktivism turn into higher youth voter turnout, considered crucial for the President's re-election? The fact that this campaign launched so late is actually a good thing, with the short memory and fickle nature of social media. But there are still a few weeks to go.
Update: Republican Texas Governor Rick Perry has already trolled the hashtag.
Clearly, no Art Directors were inconvenienced in the making of this ad. But the quiz-style long copy print ad is appearing as a full page in several Ontario dailies.
The Ontario elementary teachers (my wife is one of them) are locked in a battle of wills against the cash-strapped Ontario government. Premier Dalton McGuinty's minority government recently introduced Bill 115 to force a new contract — including wage freezes, clawbacks on bankable sick leave, and removing right to strike — on the teachers without going through the collective bargaining process. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association says it's unconstitutional, however.
I am conjugally biased on this issue, which has lead to a number of internet arguments with friends, family, and journalists. One rather disrespectful comment by the Education Minister made me so angry, I launched a petition demanding she resign or apologize for misrepresenting teachers as lazy and greedy. It has attracted almost 6,000 signatures.
I've never been a member of any union, but I find myself taking sides in this case. So, Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, if you'd like me to help you develop a more effective PR and social media strategy to get your story across, call me.
I just got around to picking up a copy of Food Inc. this week and watching the film. It's pretty good infotainment. (My 7-year-old loves it, and has been watching it over and over again!)
One of the corporate targets of the documentary makers is BPI, "Beef Products Inc.", the company responsible for extracting the meat paste from trim that has become infamous as "Pink Slime".
Meanwhile, BPI is fighting back with a campaign Wordpress site called "Pink Slime is a Myth" in which they tell their side of the story.
Actual copy: "Ammonia is essential for life. This naturally occurring substance is found in virtually all life forms, from plants to animals to humans. Life could not have evolved and cannot survive without it."
They make the usual mistake of protesting too loudly that boneless lean beef trim (their term for the product) "is beef – period".
What it is, is meat that has been separated from the trimmed fat of cow carcasses through chemical and mechanical means and has been sterilized with Ammonium Hydroxide .
What it is not, is this:
That's mechanically separated chicken. Want a nugget?
I'm not defending BPI. I think what they do is gross, and I don't want to eat it. But if we're going to stop putting processed animal byproducts in our meat snacks, we're going to have to give up cheap meat and accept a more wasteful meat industry.
What?
Let's look at it this way: livestock are more than steaks and chops. Traditional trim, carved off the bones with an expert knife, wound up as sausages, cold cuts and ground meat. It still does, if you buy your processed meats from a butcher who makes them in-store. (Which I am, admittedly, a real snob about. Even organic packaged hot dogs gross me out.)
But even the most expert cutter misses lots of digestible protein that is in unpalatable organs, bone marrow, and inextricably merged with fat. The old-school solution would be to render it into gelatin, tallow or lard, or make it into stock. But back in the '60s and '70s, food scientists started looking for ways to get more edible and saleable product from each animal. Mechanically separated meat entered the market, and it got into many of the packaged soups, burgers, sausages and finger foods you eat.
This was seen as a good thing. Consumerist quotes Roger Mandigo, a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:
"Most people would be extremely unhappy if they were served heart or tongue on a plate," he observed. "But flaked into a restructured product it loses its identity. Such products as tripe, heart, and scalded stomachs are high in protein, completely edible, wholesome, and nutritious, and most are already used in sausage without objection." Pork patties could be shaped into any form and marketed in restaurants or for airlines, solving a secondary problem of irregular portion size of cuts such as pork chops. In 1981 McDonald's introduced a boneless pork sandwich of chunked and formed meat called the McRib, developed in part through check-off funds [micro-donations from pork producers] from the NPPC [National Pork Producers Council]. It was not as popular as the McNugget, introduced in 1983, would be, even though both products were composed of unmarketable parts of the animal (skin and dark meat in the McNugget). The McNugget, however, benefited from positive consumer associations with chicken, even though it had none of the "healthy" attributes people associated with poultry.”
McRib, McNugget: McAnicallySeparatedMeat. (Although the McNugget changed to "real" chicken a few years ago.) So why is this beef process singled out for disgust?
But is it really worse than the others? The process at issue is the decontamination with ammonia, which is toxic. It was actually a breakthrough for BPI, since the trimmings that are their raw product get disgustingly contaminated in industrial butchery, and were previously not fit for human consumption. The ammonia was supposed to fix that.
But when you look for research on the safety of the process, it's not trace ammonia that's the big problem. It's that it still lets some pathogens, like e. coli and salmonella, through. BPI had been exempted from regular testing and recalls, simply because the US government was overconfident with the efficacy of chemical sterilization.
Factory mass-production of meat is gross, period. But it also allows companies to offer $1 hamburger deals and other cheap meats, plus it feeds more people per animal—which has some significant environmental benefits. The original process of mechanical separation of beef from bones was banned in the US following the mad cow epidemic, so this is one of the cheapest sources of total animal utilization available.
(Ironically, the "nose-to-tail" foodie movement attempts to accomplish the same goal, but by gourmet means, by creating recipes for offal and other unpopular animal parts.)
If we want to stop eating questionable meat, we will have to eat less meat overall and pay a lot more for it. But as long as enough people are ignorant or ambivalent about what goes in their meals, there will always be a market for Pink Slime.
My advice for BPI, and consumer advocates, is to be absolutely honest. Activists need to stop misusing the chicken image and focus fairly on all mass-produced factory meat processes (as well as related food safety, worker rights and animal welfare issues), not just the cause of the day. BPI needs to back off on its claims that their product is virtually identical to ordinary lean ground beef, and take the position that using more of the animal is more economical and sustainable as long as you don't think about it too much.
Epilogue: BPI was so outraged by its portrayal in Food Inc. and on Chef Oliver's show that it commissioned its own reactionary video series:
I haven't really touched on the Occupy Wall Street movement in here, because its politics are complicated and many others do a better job of covering it than I would.
But as the civil disobedience continues to mount, and the wealthy themselves are being directly blamed, you can leave it to the fashion industry to continue marketing luxury goods using ultra-decadence as an aspirational branding strategy.
This Agent Provocateur video [contains sexualized nudity, via Animal NY] is a perfect example.
Ah, spring! When young protesters' minds turn to naked activism!
PETA is in the news, as always, with protesters in various stages of undress attempting to raise consciousness about animal cruelty, whether it's the sale of glue traps at Lowe's hardware stores in the States, foie gras at Selfridges store in London, England, or bullfights in Croatia.
As a social marketer, I can't ignore PETA's success in getting their message in front of a large global audience audience. Controversy gets attention. Even when the approach gets them banned from the Super Bowl:
But the question I have to ask myself is, are they really accomplishing their goals? Here in Canada, we're keeping PETA particularly busy with the public brutality of our seal hunt. To try to stop it, the organization is calling for a boycott of Canadian maple syrup (which will only affects a small cottage industry of eastern farmers whose only crime is making trees bleed), making fun of Canada's 2010 Olympics logo (which just got them in legal trouble for modifying the rings), and speaking out against the Governor General for eating raw seal heart with the Inuit (although she seems to have endeared herself to many Canadians through the act).
I'm pretty sure that any bad publicity PETA stirs up, however, is all (vegan) gravy to them since it's pretty clear that their real goal was never social marketing at all, but is just a massive recruitment campaign for young, impressionable activists.
"Real" social marketing, in my view, is about giving people the information they need to make informed and realistic lifestyle changes for their own good and the good of society. While PETA conveys these messages when you actually read their various communications, their tactics speak a different language: shock and awe.
These kinds of ads are what we call "preaching to the choir"; they are unlikely to get old ladies or debutantes to keep from buying fur, but they do appeal to activists who want to see someone stick it to "cruel" businesses and consumers. To the mainstream, they just continue to ghettoize PETA and its supporters as a hysterical fringe movement that sees animals as nothing less than (or even greater than) humans.
I'm sure PETA will continue to find new recruits to replace the ones who move on, to make headlines around the world, and to cause their volunteers to get sunburnt in delicate places. They'll even make the occasional PR victory against a company through sheer embarrassment.
But will they ever convert masses of mainstream meat-eaters to lifelong vegetarianism? Cause a sport fishermen to cast off their hooks? Get the Inuit to stop hunting seals?
