Veggie Love

Commercial spots in the SuperBowl are, and it seems always have been, the most expensive adverts money, or at least media buyers, can buy. So having one of your spots banned would concern most organisations - not so PETA.

‘Veggie Love’ was banned by NBC this year for being too sexually explicit using the premise that vegetarians have better sex! The ad itself depicts lingerie clad models being ‘intimate’ with vegetables.

However, an extremely brief piece of Google based research by Daemon Digital, found the PETA TV channel which shows ‘Veggie Love’ and the other 11 spots that PETA has created that have also been banned at various points in time.

An even briefer search on You Tube found, on the first two pages of search results only, 30 uploads of the 30 second ‘Veggie Love’ spot which had been viewed over 1.61 million times (2 February 09). In addition, there were also a number of uploads of the behind the scenes video and interviews with each of the model’s.

This would seem to be a great example of how to use online social networking to communicate a traditional media message at a significantly reduced cost, not to mention the additional traditional media exposure and commentary in the blogosphere that NBC banning the commercial has generated.

For those of you keen to review the rest of this year’s SuperBowl commercials, try http://superbowl-ads.com/ or to view ‘Veggie Love and propagate the free publicity, try You Tube.