Pork - The Other Ad Slogan

The camera fades in on an empty, yet elegant dinner plate. Several medallions of succulent white meat slide off a silver serving fork and onto the bottom edge of the dish. The rest of the plate is filled clockwise with asparagus covered in a dollop of hollandaise, stuffing, and mashed sweet potatoes with a dash of pepper. A white upper-middle-aged announcer assures us that out of all the items on this plate, “the pork has the fewest calories.” He is implying here that pork has been given a bad rap as being fatty and that chicken is for losers. “Pork,” he intones, is “the other white meat.” The one you should be eating. Now.

That commercial debuted in 1987 and very effectively changed the minds of millions of “healthy” eaters to give this pork thing a go. Twenty-four years later, The National Pork Board has replaced the decades-old ad campaign with a new message: "Pork: Be Inspired."

The “other white meat” campaign was successful and stemmed a decline in pork consumption. But times have changed. The NPB feels it's time to take pork in a new direction.

Board officials said the new effort is the result of over a year’s worth of research. It’s time to move on from the old message and instead try to increase sales by focusing on the estimated 82 million Americans who already eat pork.

Apparently, eating pork makes you smarter, because this is a brilliant strategy. Sell it to the people who are already buying it. They are no longer trying to bring people over to The Pork Side. Their new campaign is aimed towards people who already eat the product, particularly medium-to-heavy consumers, which may-or-may-not refer to their heft and girth. The new direction is the direction it was going in anyway – insert GOP economic recovery plan reference here. I’ve always had a problem with advertising for food. Food food. Agriculture. Do we really need to be convinced about corn or milk or beef? You either eat it or you don’t. It’s not like they are reinventing pork. They’re not dipping pigs in chocolate or putting them on sticks. They just want you, you who already eat pork, to continue eating pork and, if possible, eat more pork.

"We want to move that needle, go after that core group of consumers," says Ceci Snyder, the Des Moines, Iowa-based board's vice-president of marketing. "These people love pork, know how to prepare it and are eager to share recipes."

Their market research determined that their core is regular folk who are adamantly not foodies. They are the tea party of the kitchen as long as it’s Lipton tea. Almost all their recipes involve the directions, stab meat, hold against fire. And the slogan the board came up with is “Be inspired.”

Here are a few of the slogans they rejected…

“Pork. Eat more of it.”

“Pork. It’s not just a verb.”

“Pork. It makes your left arm feel all tingly.”

“Pork. Swallow.”

“Pork. We really don’t care what you do with it. Make a sailor hat out of luncheon meat. We don’t care. As long as you buy it and you’re happy inside.”

Ceci also says "We want to increase pork sales by 10 percent by 2014. To do that, we need buyers to make a stronger connection, a more emotional connection to our product."

“Pork. It makes you feel special and a little weepy.”

What kind of emotional connection can someone generate for pork? “I love you, Bratwurst. I love you so much that I must have you inside me. And, by that, I mean eat you. And then pooping you out, later.”

People are already co-dependently freaky about bacon. If they want to sell more pork, just make the whole pig bacon. Bacon you can hug. Bacon you can carry on your back.

Pork sales totaled about $117 per person in 2010. Pork consumption averages about 50 pounds per person per year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

And the National Pork Board doesn’t think that’s enough. 50 pounds is only about one-fourth of the meat yielded from a slaughtered adult pig. The NPB won’t be happy until we all eat an entire pig each, per year. Me, personally, I like to get it out of the way. I eat my pig in January and then spend the rest of the year digesting.

Pork remains behind beef and chicken in consumption, according to the USDA. It is the bronze winner of the eating animals Olympics.

Still, more than 31 billion pounds of pork was produced in the U.S. in 2010, according to the Pork Board. 31 billion pounds of pork and they want to sell you more. Just to give you an idea of how much pork that is, an Olympic-sized swimming pool holds 5.5 million pounds of water. Now, imagine 5,636 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with pigs feet and hog jowls.

The old slogan will remain on the Pork Board's website and on apparel sold by the board, for you nostalgia buffs. Internet searches for "Pork: The Other White Meat" will direct people to the new campaign, as well as a few porn sites.

The board will spend more than $11 million to roll out the ads this month. It will include national print and broadcast advertising, public relations, foodservice marketing and social media. You will now be able to “like,” “friend” or “poke” pork. Online advertising has already begun, and national television ads begin in April. Print ads will also begin running in food and lifestyle publications. Lifestyle publications? You know, for those busy black, gay executive cat owners who want their pork on the go.

At the website porkbeinspired.com, there’s a section labeled “I Heart Pork” – oh, the irony. At “I Heart Pork” fans can post pork-related stories – brushes with porkness – and swap recipes. But if you are encouraging people to “be inspired” then I think it needs to go beyond recipes and move in to arts and crafts. A meat collage, perhaps. Or get some suckling pigs and hollow them out into mittens. Bedazzled sow ears. A piñata made of chorizo.

I think pork inspiration should also include poetry. Or Porkhus.

Piggy sleeps in mud

Dreaming of feathers for flight

Wakes up a hot dog

Pork is a show off

Spiral-cut and honey-glazed

Pork is a big ham

How about a limerick? Or, what I like to call, a SlimJimmerick.

There once was a pig from New York

Who feared being turned into pork

He danced the can-can

Too close to a fan

Now he can be eaten with a fork

Self-Publification (recorded live before a studio audience)

The segment I wrote and performed for The Paper Machete is now available in podcast form for free.

You can find it by clicking HERE.

Self-Publification

Last Saturday, I made my debut at one of my favorite Chicago shows, The Paper Machete. The Paper Machete was created by and is hosted by Christopher Piatt who describes it as "a free, weekly 'live magazine' covering pop culture, current events and American manners. Part spoken-word show, part vaudeville revue, The Paper Machete features comedians, journalists, storytellers and musical guests performing in the back room of north side bar. It’s a salon in a saloon." Chris asked me to do something about something from the news. On Thursday night, we settled on me addressing Amazon being pressured to remove an eBook about how a pedophile can practice their "craft" and not to get caught. My angle is was my own experience in self-publishing.

Here's what I wrote and performed. It started with me carrying a copy of my book up to the microphone.


This is a book I wrote. Sort of. In 2009, I wrote a comedy sketch a day for a year. This is all of them in one place. I didn’t write them to have a book, but they ended up in there. Not published by Simon and Schuster or Samuel French or some University Press. Published by me. And I hope that by the time I am done here, you are disgusted by it. Assuming you aren’t already.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Last year, the official NaNoWriMo website had 165,000 participants registered. 30,000 of them completed the goal of cranking out a 50,000 word novel from scratch. It’s like the marathon for out-of-shape would-be writers. If this year’s number of participants has increased like it has every other year, that means come December 1^st, there could potentially be 40,000 new novels completed and published. Not from any big publishing house. Not placed in some fancy display at Borders. 40,000 new novels unleashed into the wild, available on-line as downloadable eBooks. We live in an age where anyone with a blog can be considered a published author, anyone with a webcam can be a filmmaker or porn star or both. We live in an age where anyone can create a piece of work and put it on the Internet for potential millions to see and then write about it on their own blogs. And most of what’s being generated out there is just crap.

Millions of people upload YouTube videos every day. Millions of bloggers post content every day, mostly recounts of vacations and videos of cats. I am guilty of both. The number of podcasts available for free just through iTunes is staggering. Musicians are using their laptops for recording studios and posting their work on-line. Although, in the music industry, it’s not called self-publishing, it’s called self-releasing. Which sounds more appropriate and makes me giggle.

In theater, it’s not unusual for a show to cancel if the number of people in the cast outnumbers the people in the audience. As a society, we’re getting close to having to cancel our show. There are more artists than audience. People complain about not being able to draw an audience to their show. That’s because the audience is busy elsewhere doing their own shows. In Chicago, you can see improv seven nights a week in a few different locations. Is there that much of a demand for it? No. No one is clamoring to see Uncle Billy’s Fun Sack do a montage at 11pm on a Sunday in the back of a dive bar. There are that many shows because there are that many people wanting and willing to do that show. Self-produced. The theater world’s version of self-published.

The problem with so much content being created and “published” is that there’s no filter. There’s no one sitting behind a desk going, “Ew. No. Not that one.” For many of us, that’s good news. A lot of good, interesting artists get a chance to be seen or heard. But when the floodgates are open, a lot of flotsam gets a chance, too. On October 28^th, Amazon allowed Philip R. Greaves II, or in today’s vernacular, Phillip R. Greaves .2, to upload a new eBook. An experienced “published” author, he already has two other eBooks.

The other books on Amazon that Greaves wrote have nothing to do with sexual molestation. One is called A Government of Service to All – “A discripeion of the political realities that influence us all.” And there’s my all time favorite, The Grand Delusion or What’s God Got To Do With It? Described as “An examination of man and his many notions of "God" with an aim toward disproving the existence of any universal intelengence of omnipotent creator. “ That’s right. He misspelled “intelligence.” The only thing being molested in these books is spelling. Or, as Greaves would write, “spieling.” Self-publishing is not only an assault on our morals and principles, it’s an assault on the English language.
((Note: I tried to link to these this morning, and it looks like Amazon has taken everything by Greaves off their website.))

His latest non-seller, a self-help book. The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct. It offers advice to pedophiles afraid of becoming the center of retaliation and includes first-person descriptions of such encounters, purportedly written from a child's point of view.

The book triggered outrage on Twitter – our newest form of quick self-published shouts at the world. A chorus of comment leavers on the book’s Amazon page called for them to pull the book. Which they did do. Three weeks after it was made available. Not because of any principles, because of the bad press they were getting and the threat of a boycott. Look, I’m not defending pedophilia or a pedophile. I’m all for whatever floats your boat as long as it does no harm to anyone and, if another boat’s involved, it’s there because it wants to be there, is of legal boating age and you’re not a Somali pirate. Amazon initially refused to take the book down based on freedom of speech. Hard to argue against because then we start talking about where to draw lines.

Many critics claimed Amazon endorsed pedophilia just because they carried the book. They have many other books about pedophilia, fiction and non-fiction. From text books to Lolita. This one, however, tells people how to get away with it, which many people feel, goes too far. Easy to understand, but based on that logic, there’s more stuff for Amazon to take down. They also carry the Dexter books and DVDs, and I’m pretty sure they don’t endorse serial killing. Now, you might make the case that one is non-fiction and offers actual advice on how to get away with breaking the law. Except Dexter does exactly that. It’s a code of conduct for serial killers who don’t want to get caught.

They also carry other books that are literally instructional manuals on how to commit crimes. The Anarchist’s Cookbook, The Marijuana Growers Handbook and Decision Points by George W. Bush.

A more frightening book on Amazon that I found is Improvised Munitions Black Book, Vol. 1. Volume 1! There’s more to come. It gets rave customer reviews, mostly folks from Northern Ireland. “if you want a good book about explosives, rockets, chemical mixtures, how to build devices, and how to acquire ingredients, this book is for you.” That’s a direct quote. No protests in the comments section from anyone. A little more frightening is the accredited author. Self-published by the US Government. On the Amazon webpage there’s a section of “customers who bought this also bought…” which leads you to Uncle Sam’s other book, the U.S. Marine Corps Sniper Training Manual, just in case that DIY bomb didn’t go off.

Before the Pedophilia for Dummies book hit the headlines, its author claimed it had sold precisely one copy. After the media picked up the story, it had moved enough units to make the Amazon’s Top 100 list. Top 100 out of hundreds of thousands of books. Quite an accomplishment for a self-published eBook by an unknown author who rejects the oppression of spellcheck. I seriously doubt the books, were scooped up exclusively by pedophiles. That’s the double-edged sword of offensive material. One has to read it to be able to intelligently comment on it. Oh, not the people protesting. We all know the loudest protesters are the ones who didn’t read the book or see the movie. Sadly, for them, the digital age has taken its toll on book burnings. Used to be able to gather a bunch of copies up and set them on fire to demonstrate your disgust. Can’t throw a bunch of eBooks in a pile and hit delete.

Self-publishing is intoxicating. After I wrote a comedy sketch a day for a year, they were all produced last June. We had 26 directors putting up 26 shows with 176 actors over eleven nights at the Strawdog. I wanted to give the directors something special to say thank you for their hard work. I went to lulu.com, a self-publishing site. Although, lulu calls it “open publishing,” I guess because “it’s complicated” publishing didn’t sound very inviting. There, I uploaded the scenes into this book. With the click of a mouse, I became a published author. You can find the book on-line. Even at Amazon.

When I brought hard copies in to give to directors, other people asked me about buying one for themselves. Dollar signs shot off in my head like green and gold fireworks. I dreamt of being able to retire and just lie in a bed of royalties from book sales. That, of course, hasn’t happened. Instead of a bed, maybe a nice throw pillow of royalties. Not a big audience of readers for a telephone book sized tome of scripted sketch comedy by some guy.

I’m fine with that. It was meant as a souvenir of the event. Nothing more. But it would be nice to hit the Amazon Top 100 at least once, even for a moment. I mean, if a pedophile - who spells “perversity” with two “c”s - can do it… I just need to convince everyone there’s a reason to protest it. This thing (I hold up 365 Sketches) is vile and offensive.

Let me read some of the scene titles to you…

“Unicorns – Let’s Fuck Them Without Permission”

“Give The Elderly Aids”

“Anything Can Be A Urinal, Especially On A Train or At A Buffet”

“Lynching’s Aren’t Fun, Not Without Bungee Cords”

“Cancer is God’s Way of Saying Die, Already!”

Riled up, yet? It’s available on-line and in book form. A really big, easy to burn book. You can build a bonfire that will last for days. It’s also on sale at The Book Cellar. I think we should all march up there after. Everyone throw in a few bucks, I’m good for two dollars, and we buy a copy and set it on fire. Afterward, we can also have some wine and a sandwich. I love that place.

Greaves.2, my fellow published author, was interviewed by The Smoking Gun, and insisted his book doesn't advocate for adults to harm children. "The best advice I can give a pedophile,” he says, “is accept that masturbation is your best friend.”

...which brings me back to the topic of self-publication.