Marketing Animals - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

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WPP Agency Grey London It’s Not About Great Britain WPP Agency Grey London farming practices and demonstrated tensions between interpretations of the advertisement and concerns over the implied meanings about cow welfare, the ITC’s response made it clear that what was at issue was the representation of the product and not the misrepresentation of the realities of the lives of dairy cows. In an attempt to recover butter-making within the discourse of tradition, a 2010 Anchor Butter commercial returned to live action and depicted cows leaving the fields to work in a factory with the strap-line: “Made by cows since 1886.” The aim of the £10 million campaign was to position the company as the “Original Butter Co.” [vi] A country music version of the Guns N’ Roses song Paradise City with the lyrics: “Take me down to a paradise city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty, oh won’t you please take me home” accompanied images of cows “clocking-on,” operating production machinery, performing quality checks, and packaging the butter for delivery in a nineteenth century factory setting housing contemporary industrial technologies. In the simulation of nineteenth century factory production, the advert reimagined the relationship between cows and milk by excluding the process of milking. Rather than “producing milk,” cows “make butter.” In constructing new associations between the company and tradition, Anchor Butter also shed its “free-range” identity. And although the advertisement placed cows within the confines of the factory setting, taking on the humanised roles of operatives, the concept of the advertisement suggested that butter-making retained links with traditional agricultural and industrial practices. The opening and closing images still drew directly on the aesthetic traditions of nineteenth century British landscape painting with large romanticised 26 landscapes at daybreak and sunset. In this way, a nostalgia discourse framed butter-making as traditional and the company as having authenticity through the rather surreal imagery of cows being happily complicit in their own exploitation. A challenge to the Anchor campaign came in the form of a counter-campaign by Country Life Butter, which used the former member of the 1970’s punk band The Sex Pistols, John Lydon, to front its advertising. The central message of the campaign was that Country Life Butter is British and Anchor Butter is from New Zealand. The Country Life campaign underscored how robust the associations were between the Anchor Butter brand and national identity, and the counter-campaign sought to dismantle those meanings and reclaim imagery of “British” cows and countryside. The television advertisement showed John Lydon experiencing various aspects of British rural life: the British countryside was depicted as sheep on a country lane, and the concept of “British milk” was represented by black and white cows chasing Lydon through an expanse of green fields. The pack shot at the end of the advertisement returned to the image of open green fields. The print adverts that were placed in broadsheets and the popular press used an image of Lydon bursting through the page of the newspaper under the “headlines:” ”Revealed: Anchor Butter is from New Zealand” (broadsheet advertisement, July 2010); and “Anchor’s from New Zealand” (tabloid advertisement, July 2010). The campaigns mounted by Anchor and Country Life revealed the high investment of meaning in cows and the landscape, and by extension, the commercial value of both. Macnaughten and Urry argue that representations of natural space are socially and symbolically produced and that “different features of the landscape are celebrated within different societies” (Macnaughten and Urry, 1998, p.182). The spaces appropriated in advertising by Anchor Butter, for the UK market, and Country Life, borrowed from established conventions of representing “the countryside” as peaceful, green and fertile, and symbolically opposed to the industrialisation of towns and cities. In this way, the production of meanings around cows and landscape are mutually reinforcing. Landscape can operate through a multiplicity of discourses as a form of nostalgia that recalls an idealised past and as a symbol of freedom, of “naturalness,” and in opposition to industrialisation. Each of these meanings
translates into context for the bovine body, which is then understood as part of a cultural and social heritage, and which, in turn, reproduces the sense that cows have always had freedom to roam and have always been apart from industrialisation. Locating cows within the idealised landscapes of a particular country or region thus reinforces symbolic associations between a sense of place, conceived through the highly organised imagery of the natural world, and the ”naturalness” of the life of a dairy cow. In doing this, the connections allude to milk production as a wholesome process that takes place in only the most ideal of locations. A proliferation of cow imagery in UK advertising suggests that, at a symbolic level, some animals are more economically significant than others. This concurs with a 2002 survey in which cows appeared as the eighth most effective animal for advertising purposes. One reason for the popularity of cows (as images) may be that their meanings within the circuits of capitalism have a legacy in nineteenth century landscape painting, where benign bovine bodies have long been associated with a calm and tranquil British rural life - a culturally imagined antidote to industrialisation and urbanisation. In this way, the reality of the bovine experience has been mediated by landscape painting and remediated by the advertising discourses discussed here. The landscapes take on new meanings in the light of welfare discourses. Open spaces that signalled nonindustrialisation are transformed by welfare discourses which reconfigure the landscape as an ethical space through associations with the meanings of “free-range” and “free-to-roam.” As a result, in advertising for dairy-related products, agricultural spaces overlap with the meanings and values that are assigned to nature and “the countryside,” and these in turn close down the opportunities for questions about welfare standards and reduce dairy farming practices to an extremely narrow range of representations. References [i] Source: Defra (2008) The Environmental Impact of Livestock Production [ii] Source: The National Trust (2001) Farming Forward [iii] Source: Defra (2008) The Environmental Impact of Livestock Production. [iv] Source: Miller & Robertson, 1959, p.432. 27 [v] Source: NZ Government website, “Dairy cattle numbers 1895-2005” online at http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/dairying- and-dairy-products/10/1/1 [accessed 4 May 2010]. [vi] Source: Marketing Week, 26 February 2010 online at http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/anchor-launches- %C2%A310m-ad-push-to-support-brandrepositioning/3010501.article [accessed 3 March 2010]. This piece is adapted with permission from ‘Farmed: Selling Animal Products’ in Popular Media and Animals (Molloy, 2012). Professor Claire Molloy is Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media at Edge Hill University. Her publications include the books: Popular Media and Animals (2012), Memento (2010), Beyond Human:xfrom animality to transhumanism (2011) and American IndependentxCinema: indie, indiewood and beyond.
Page 1 and 2: Antennae Issue 23 - Winter 2012 ISS
Page 3 and 4: EDITORIAL ANTENNAE ISSUE 23 T his i
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