I decided I needed to narrow down what I was trying to do. Instead of using the food characters I had created for the first designs, which I had made into male/female to identify what an oddity it is to sexualise food, I tried to simplify it. I have instead decided to keep the idea of sex and food linked, without defining a specific gender. This allows me to acknowledge the somewhat derogatory nature of this method, without creating derogatory designs.
I still wanted to create an alternative campaign for an existing brand, and found in my research that, of all the brands I had looked at, PETA was surprisingly the most consistently inappropriate in their imagery:
The text above can be seen on PETA's website, where they themselves have acknowledged their controversial advertising techniques, arguing that they are designed to see animals as human, in order for people to recognise that animal cruelty is murder.
As a method for targeting animal cruelty as the problem, I can understand the reason for using caged humans, however one element to this I don't understand is the vegetarian aspect of the promotion. Vegetarianism is a choice that people make to not eat meat, the key word being 'choice'. Using a naked woman to make claims that eating meat induces erectile disfunction is a ploy to guilt a man into vegetarianism, because the busty blonde won't otherwise find him attractive.
I have concluded that I aim to rebrand their campaign for vegetarianism, a challenge given that I have no desire to stop eating meat. I plan to acknowledge the innuendos made but to eliminate the element of guilt to their current adverts and simplify the concept down to what the real focus is: food.
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