Vegans, now that's a campaign with no meat in it

Photo: Bassam Karam

Now, how do you tell a campaign without a backbone? It is firing on all fronts but missing most - if not all - if its targets. Let's recap. Vegans went all out, I covered the first unipole thinking it is a stand-alone (here). Turns out there is more where it came from. The first installment was very provocative, reaching to negative psychology. The second, above, goes "did I bother you saying vegan? What if I said vegetarian, Better? OK what if I said lent food?". Just to be clear, vegan has no Arabic equivalent and "vegetarian" is "nabati" (as mentioned in the ad - and up to my knowledge vegetarian and vegan are completely different diets). As for "lent food", I am not sure it is judicious to play on religious sensibilities in a country like Lebanon. 

So between the first installment and this, I can feel that the notion was "let's fire on all angles". Or as I called prior "the spaghetti theory" - you throw the ball at the wall and see what sticks.

Vegans go public in Lebanon

Photo credit: Bassam Karam

So this is an ad, not just for vegetarians - but for out and out vegans. Well, thankfully no nudity (I'd rather go naked than wear fur for Peta comes to mind). But hey, well the ad uses negative psychology by starting with "don't be a vegan" (interestingly, vegan has no translation in Arabic because "نباتي" means vegetarian "only"). So voila, once the negative psychology deployed, it continues with "because whatever is happening in the slaughterhouse resembles you". A few months ago a close friend came up with the joke "how do you know that someone is vegetarian or an AUB student? They'll tell you this right from the get-go". Well, I am an AUB student... Ooops. OK, fine, and I tried to be a vegetarian (not even vegan) long ago but well, did not work, so what I do now is really, really decrease meat as much as I can. However, I heard many reactions to the ad above, the strongest was "I just ordered a steak out of spite". I guess this covers it.