Is HungryThirsty dead meat?
We have seen a couple of interesting advertisements hit the scene in the past couple of weeks one very inclusive read more on that here; and one a very exclusive advertisement for OAK Milk and there once heralded HungryThirsty catchphrase.
If you haven’t seen it yet you scrolled very quickly when landing on this page – scroll back up… go on… I’ll wait.
By exclusive I did not mean fashionable or private I mean exclusionary – as you can see OAK decided to take on vegan sausages, apparently a sensitive subject.
Many vegans were up in arms with the tawdry treatment launching very vocal attacks on social media. I, for one, think the advertisement is ok (I live with a vegan, I am not sure if that qualifies me on any level, and just by writing this I run the risk of sleeping on our non leather couch tonight) but I think it would be shortsighted of OAK and their agency if they didn’t think they would receive any backlash.
On one level they are making fun of a food item and not vegans in general – so that’s ok with me. And on another level, vegans don’t drink milk so to offend a group that will never be your customer, at least for the bottom line, is ok as well. That’s not to say that we condone offending people as a way to some quick PR.
I would say that the sort of person that is impressed with the ad is also the sort of person that will be happy that those pallid, bleeding heart vegans were offended. Oh god, now I might be raising the ire of the erudite, milk drinking, OAK loving masses by suggesting that they would be uncouth enough to enjoy riling up a bunch of vegans.
The point is the ad is fine, it speaks to it’s target market succinctly. OAK’s reaction however is another thing. Since releasing the ad OAK hasn’t made any comments on their accounts or to the media as far as this person can tell; which makes me think they were not ready for the reaction and not agile enough to react accordingly.
They could have heeded their naysayers words and kept the conversation going while still in the limelight or they could have upped the ante and started offending other groups, perhaps white supremacists didn’t realise that HungryThirsty is satisfied much better by milk that comes from black or brown cows than white cows.
The opposite of an exclusionary tactic is inclusive the new lamb ad is a brilliant example.
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