A spoofful of meat

Moooow the force be with you!

A couple days ago I wrote about the French agrarian activity, and today I was introduced to a brilliant American initiative about rational meat exploitation. Sustainable Table is a US organisation which promotes sustainable development with a focus on the food chain. To address and engage their audience, the group realised that there is a strange parallel between the matrix movie and the reality they were facing in meat production industry. Big food multinationals would be fouling the consumers by hiding the awful reality of industrial meat processing behind smoke screens called the Meatrix.

Enter Moopheus, Chickity and The Chosen One, Leo Hamderson. The three cartoon characters will help the viewers to go beyond what they think to see and break down the meatrix... To date, there has been three spoofs of the Wachowski trilogy. These three films can be seen here: The Meatrix, The Meatrix II: Revolting and the latest opus, Meatrix II ½. A European Meatrix sequel would be in the pipe...

This initiative, although US-born, has been conceived as a truly international project. As a consequence, the films but also their derivative products have been localised in over 30 languages spanning from Tibetan to Swahili, from Serbian to Finnish... So no matter where you are from or the language you speak, you must find a match on their site. And since we are living in a digital world, these films are also available for download in PC, MAC and iPOD versions alongside with other PDA applications or questionnaires (see here).

Engaging your mind and belly.

This is becoming a cliché in nowadays marketing talks, but the key to success when delivering messages is to entertain the audience so that their engagement is greater. Take my example for instance. Amused by the first film, I went to their site and watched the full series. I have even gone through their entire site and connected galaxy to find out more about their motivations.

Sustainable Table partners in this project are starting to settle themselves as a reference on the viral scene. Free Range Studios indeed reached top of the charts with their spoof of Star Wars using vegetables:

As they put it themselves, Free Range Studios are "a team of passionate, wildly creative people who spend [their] days strategizing, branding and designing so the most important social messages get through loud and clear. " And let's face it, they do it pretty well. It is indeed interesting that there is a growing number of agencies that are focusing on ethical topics.

Do the marketers feel ashame about their encouragement to mass consumption? Advertising redemption seems to be on its way.