A racy billboard about beef causing male impotence will not be erected on schedule, but the eye-popping ad won’t stay down for long.
The anti-meat group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, was planning to launch its national campaign last Friday in Regina and Calgary, but the billboard company MediaCom Inc. refused to put up the ads.
Many Canadian newspapers ran photos and stories about the billboards before they were to be erected. The ads show a bikini-clad woman holding a link of sausages next to the slogan “I threw a party but the cattlemen couldn’t come.” Below that is a line saying, “Eating meat can cause impotence.”
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MediaCom refused to put up the billboards after it was flooded with calls from irate people and outraged women’s groups upset about everything from the way women were portrayed in the ad to the validity of the impotence claim.
“We had calls from people who are vegetarians who said, ‘You know, I’m a vegetarian, but I don’t want to be associated with anything like this,’ ” said MediaCom spokesperson Kim Warburton.
The Canadian Cattlemen’s Association and Alberta Cattle Commission declined comment on the billboards other than to say the claim that meat causes impotence is “ludicrous.”
PETA is “quite disappointed” with MediaCom’s actions, but it intends to find another Canadian billboard company that will accept the ads, said Bruce Friedrich, PETA’s vegetarian campaign co-ordinator.
Friedrich is “absolutely blown away” by the media coverage the ads generated even before the billboards were in place.
He said the ad was designed to get people thinking about becoming vegetarians and he said it’s working. Last week the Norfolk, Virginia-based group received 1,000 requests from Canadian citizens for its free vegetarian starter kit.
“Apparently some men care more about their sex life than their life span and we’re appealing to those guys on their terms,” said Friedrich.
“We sometimes resort to amusing or interesting or controversial means to make our point because we don’t have the budget that the meat and dairy industry have.”
A year ago the animal rights group put up a billboard that claimed “Jesus was a vegetarian.”
University of Saskatchewan marketing professor John Rigby said these kinds of ads can be more detrimental than effective. He said there’s a fine line between getting people’s attention and angering them.
“If you’re annoying people, while you may get their attention you will not change their attitudes or practices and, at the end of the day, that’s what advertising is trying to do,” said Rigby.
“(PETA) would say ‘Well people are talking about this and they weren’t a week and a half ago.’ My counterpoint is yes they’re talking about it, but they’re saying things like, ‘These people are nuts.’ “
Peter Barrett agrees. The Saskatoon urologist has seen no evidence or study linking meat consumption with impotence.
“I read the literature pretty faithfully. It would be hard to believe there’s a big epidemic of beef impotence and we wouldn’t know about it, especially in this part of the world.”
