Advertising Agency: Germaine, Antwerp, Belgium
Creative Director: André Plaisier
Art Directors: Alexis Bellavoine, Jeroen Goossens
Copywriter: Pieter Claeys
Photographer: Kurt Stallaert
Retouching: Edwin Veer
Published: October 2008
Now I may be wrong about this but I don’t think the World Wildlife Fund explicitly promotes vegetarianism. (They were in fact recently caught selling fish sticks to raise money for fish conservation; but on the whole they are, I think, generally opposed to a meat diet.)
The message of the ad is just as unclear as their position. But to be fair, in the Dutch original, a commenter notes, the copy reads, “over-consuming the earth”, which is a little more coherent than the English version’s reprimand on consumption proper. But even so, the larger conflict between word and image remains: while the ad’s slogan discourages meat-eating as an environmentally unsustainable practice, the image introduces a somewhat unrelated moral dimension, and it is this conflict of message that seems to have caused most of the confusion in its reception (-see the comments).
But this confusion is no accident. The internal dissonance in the ad manifests perfectly, if unintentionally, the internal schism of the animal rights movement itself. The more mainstream-friendly ‘unsustainable’ argument against meat-eating here runs up against the ethical argument against the murder of animals — which is what makes this ad so unusual. The ideological ambivalence of the WWF can’t help but be reflected in its message to the public.
