How many offensive ad campaigns could companies create this year? Plenty.

Many businesses are realizing that consumers are looking for brands that care, brands that engage in dialogue, and brands that understand current trends. These companies are adapting to these new sensibilities and their businesses are thriving. Other companies have launched sexist ad campaigns, derided green actions, squelched customer’s comments and complaints, and mounted a merciless attack on local businesses, and consumers have spoken out.

Green is popular. Therefore, shaming green initiatives shows you are not only clueless, but part of the problem.

Despite the rising popularity (and wide media coverage) of bike sharing programs in cities and the number of cities looking to institute more bike lanes and encourage bicycle commuting, GM decided to run an ad campaign designed to make bicyclists feel ashamed of biking. The campaign, run in college magazines and aimed at current students and recent grads, shows a guy riding his bike and covering his face as a girl rides by in her (presumably GM) car. The tag line reads: Stop pedaling…start driving, and shows a picture of a smaller car, and a … truck.

There was an immediate outcry. Bicycling organizations, students and even professors condemned the ad and everything it stood for. GM backpedaled so fast that it immediately yanked the ads and began apologizing via Facebook and through every other type of social media it could find. The company responded to many of the negative comments and apologized.

Why do companies never tire of spitting on women and girls to sell stuff?

Dr. Pepper was tired of selling diet soda only to women. Who really wants to appeal to the demographic that makes over 80 percent of household buying decisions anyway? So they decided the way to appeal to men was to make a point of excluding women. On their Facebook page they even encouraged male-only users (it is off-limits to women) to play games where they shoot high heels, unicorns and rainbows.

Surprising no one but Dr. Pepper, the campaign didn’t appeal to most men (which is somewhat reassuring) and since it went out of its way to alienate women, no one was left to buy it.

Some companies still think it’s a good idea to sell items by sexualizing girls or promoting sexist stereotypes (or both at the same time). Abercrombie and Fitch has been a repeat offender, and this past year, family-oriented retailers Kmart and JCPenney joined the club. JCPenney quickly took this t-shirt out of inventory after being flooded with complaints, and a Kmart located in Australia took these thongs off the shelves for the same reason. The thongs are made by Kmart’s inhouse brand, Girl Xpress and the perception was that they were marketing them toward young girls. Kmart denied it, but wouldn’t state the customer age range Girl Xpress was targeting.

To be honest, it’s hard to tell what the point of this campaign was supposed to be, but whatever it was, everyone quickly lost sight of it. One blogger complained on Chapstick’s Facebook page about the use of this tacky, unattractive picture of a woman’s derriere in tight jeans. The company promptly deleted her comment (an irony many have pointed out considering the company’s invitation to be heard on their page). Ditto the negative comments that came after it. However, comments like, “after looking at this pic i know right where i wanna hide my chapstick,” were not deleted by the company.

Soon it was a battle to see who was faster, the commenters or the censors. Everyone forgot about the ad that sparked the war in the first place and directed their fury at the company who tried to control the conversation. That is something you just don’t do in social media and Chapstick came out of what could have been a minor embarrassment looking like an exceedingly foolish, 800-pound gorilla.

When you are Goliath, recruiting bystanders to pound David into dust makes you look like an even bigger bully.

It’s not enough that Amazon undercuts the prices of most local bookstores, but now they are encouraging consumers to go into local businesses, scan items and compare the price with the same item on Amazon. Since in many instances, Amazon doesn’t charge sales tax, the savings can be significant, causing many shoppers to not buy the item at the local business and buy the item online.

When promoting this new price check app, Amazon offered customers $5 for each item they bought using it (up to a total of $15). Forbes calls it the future of business, but in the face of Small Business Saturday and all the evidence that communities need to patronize and support local businesses to help local economies, Amazon’s campaign is as brazen as it is mercenary and cold-hearted.

Sometimes when you do everything right, it still goes wrong because your consumers can’t be bothered to read the label.

Coca-Cola thought it would be such a terrific holiday-cause marketing campaign to support polar bears, a species in dire need of help as well as animals that have been prominently featured in nostalgic Coke holiday ads in years past. They designed an eye-catching white can and prepared to watch awareness and profits grow. What happened? No one bothered to read the label, so Diet Coke (which is sold in a silver can) drinkers bought the white regular Coke by accident and then screamed about it.

Of course it is serious when diabetics or others with dietary restrictions consume something they shouldn’t due to a purchasing mistake, but many companies have very slight label differences that distinguish their products, but no one goes after them with the viciousness that Coke faced for simply offering the same drink in a special issue white can instead of a red one.

Many see this as a failed campaign by Coke, but did they really do anything wrong? Faced with an ugly public backlash, they have halted the manufacture of the white cans and are introducing a red polar bear can for the rest of the campaign. Now people can go back to not paying attention to what they buy again.

SEE ALSO:

2011 In Review: The 10 Stories That Defined Shelter in 2011

2011 in Review: How Small Spaces Trumped McMansions

images: bitzcelt, BikePortland, YouTube, Huffington Post, lovelyish.com, The Real Time Report, iTunes, the rocketeer (via Flickr cc)

The post The Most Offensive Ad Campaigns of 2011 appeared first on EcoSalon.

A funny thing happened on the way to the local food movement. Just as small segments of the population have taken up the local foods cheer, family farms and the infrastructure that supports them continue to dwindle daily. Even as we’ve begun to realize what our addiction to convenience in the form of processed, packaged foods and cheap meat is costing us, we are in danger of losing even more sources of real food.

Hopefully we have not gone too far toward mass consolidation to dig ourselves out, because many people think that local foods are a path out of many of both our economic and environmental woes. They certainly provide a way to eat better (as in healthier and tastier), reduce one’s impact on the environment, and support local, resilient economies.

Consider this: In 2005, the year that the term “Locavore” was first uttered by Jessica Prentice we were continuing the loss of farmland that began in the 30s and accelerated in the 70s and 80s. Between 2005 and 2006, the U.S. lost 8,900 farms (a little more than one farm per hour) The American Farmland Trust estimates that we lose one acre of agricultural land per minute to development.

With the farmland goes infrastructure like feed stores, slaughterhouses, tractor dealers and the jobs go with them. Between 2001 and 2005, 200 federally inspected meat processing plants disappeared. Most were very small plants. Today, four corporations slaughter 80 percent of the cattle in the United States.

But even as we continue to lose farmland and infrastructure, like slaughterhouses, there’s a nascent movement toward re-localizing. It’s driven by the small but real demand for local foods and also, in response to that demand, by the new USDA.

As the Ethicurean reported recently, the USDA has published a study on the impact of local food dollars called “Local Food Systems: Concepts, Impacts, and Issues.” Though direct-to-consumer sales from farmers markets, farm stands, and U-pick were only 0.4 percent of the total food economy, the numbers are growing. Local foods are growing at a rage of 10 percent per year outpacing the rest of the food economy’s growth rate of five percent.

As with other local foods, there’s a growing demand for small-scale, local meat production. The people driving the demand want to know where their food comes from and they don’t want to contribute to the devastating ecological impacts of CAFOS (confined animal feeding operations).

The USDA is supporting this movement in a variety of ways. One of the more creative is its funding and support of mobile slaughterhouses. These facilities are just coming online in several areas around the U.S. and allow smaller farmers access to USDA inspected facilities. If we are to re-localize meat production away from the four giant corporations, the small farmers will need processing facilities appropriate to their scale of production and feasibly near enough to local markets.

This move is necessary because, as the Washington Post article above points out, the barriers for small, ecological farmers in getting their product to market are incredibly high. Big slaughterhouses require appointments far in advance, are spread out and consolidated across the country, and may not want to deal with small herds. The USDA is helping small meat producers stay on their land farming by supporting the development of more mobile slaughterhouses. They provide funding, USDA inspectors, and a help line for small producers.

Though this is a tiny segment that only affects a few farmers and consumers, it is a creative strategy for reducing animal agriculture’s impact on the environment and perhaps even saving rural economies from extinction.

Environmentally, smaller scale animal operations produce fewer impacts. According to a report by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the animal waste from factory farms is produced in such large quantities, it is impossible to deal with in a responsible way and use as fertilizer, which is a role that animal agriculture has always played in row crop farming. Not to mention, the manure excreted by animals in factory farms often has a range of toxins including antibiotic-resistant residue and endocrine disrupting chemicals. These and other pollutants can get into water and airways, negatively affecting nearby communities. However, the waste created on smaller, more environmentally sustainable farms raising both crops and animals, can be dealt with effectively and used to fertilize crops.

Recent studies are starting to point to local foods as a way to jump start sagging economies. According to The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), a typical farmer gets paid 10 cents of each retail food dollar, but farmers who sell direct to consumer get more money to invest in their farm and support their family. Strengthening rural communities is the key to a healthy and diversified economy. While dollars spent with large corporations almost immediately leave the community, dollars spent on local food products circulate within the community eight to 15 times, drastically improving the value of your purchase.

A local food economy study conducted by Sustainable Seattle found that locally directed spending by consumers more than doubles the number of dollars circulating among businesses in the community. Put quantitatively, the study found that a shift of 20 percent of food dollars into locally directed spending would result in a nearly half billion dollar annual income increase in King County alone and twice that in the Central Puget Sound region.

If re-localizing food production really is a way to work toward a more economically and environmentally sustainable future, than mobile slaughterhouses can be part of a larger rebuilding of the infrastructure of community-based agriculture.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: Hans S

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