Tired meat ads are mutton dressed as lamb

THE new lamb ad is doing PETA’s work for it, writes James Morrow. Taking lame potshots at your biggest consumers is surely number one on marketing’s what not to do list.

THEY must be laughing deep in the bowels of PETA or Spectre or wherever it is they are conspiring to turn Australians into a mob of mung bean-munching, pleather-shoe wearing vegans.

Because if the latest lamb ad from Meat and Livestock Australia is anything to go by, they’ve managed to infiltrate an agent deep inside the chop business’s creative team.

Your reaction may vary, but for this confirmed lamb lover — Sunday roast shoulder, dinner party rack, it’s all good — this year’s ad, unlike so many previous years’ offerings, made me never want to fire up the Weber again.

Why?

Because they have taken lamb — which is, along with beef, chicken, partridge, pork, venison, veal, and foie gras, one of the greatest proteins you can put on a plate — and served it up in a politically correct musical mash-up that feels like a high school debate team’s attempt at an act for talent night.

The action is set in front of a house on a sleepy cul-de-sac deep in the heart of McMansionland.

A mother is out the front barbequing lamb chops and kebabs for her children (hooray for overturning traditional gender roles!) when two stern-faced groups appear on the street, one lily-white and dressed in blue, the other diverse and dressed in red, snapping their fingers in time.

You don’t have to be Martin Scorsese to see where this little film clip is going.

“Quick kids, go inside!” yells mum.

Sam Kekovich makes a cameo in the new lamb ad, but we like his old stuff better than his new stuff. (Pic: supplied)

“It’s the extreme left and right wing commentators represented as Broadway musical-style street gangs, a satirical commentary on our current divided political climate!”

As the old saying goes, if you have to explain the joke, well… let’s just say it’s amazing that somewhere a group of execs whose job it is to put lamb on forks decided mashing up a stylised street fight a la “West Side Story” with the level of social commentary found in that kindergarten assembly favourite “I Can Sing a Rainbow” would do the job.

What follows is all so predictable.

Team Blue and Team Red sing at each other about same-sex couples and climate change and political correctness; there’s even a gay couple named Adam and Steve who manage to inject a bit of humour into the strained earnestness of it all.

A diverse crowd of neighbours appears from the hedges, the mother makes peace between the warring tribes, and everybody is united by the lyric, “you’ll never lamb alone”.

Of course, the ad is hardly neutral and viewers have no doubt which side its authors are on: Team Red is concerned about the planet, Team Blue is presented as homophobes obsessed with the War on Christmas.

But it’s an open secret that those who profess the greatest allegiance to the causes of humanity all too often treat individual humans abysmally. After all, when he was finally sprung, Hillary Clinton’s pal Harvey Weinstein thought he could make his troubles go away by pledging to work harder for gun control.

Nor does it seem like a smart idea to condescend to conservatives; on a per capita basis those on the right are far more likely to be lamb eaters than leftie progressives with their kale smoothies and all-night share house meetings to figure out who drank Myfanwy’s almond milk.

Make it stop. (Pic: supplied)

And that’s the reason the new lamb ad doesn’t work, where the early numbers with Sam Kekovich nailed their target.

Back in 2005, when Kekovich delivered his first deadpan lamb rant to the camera, he nailed the Australian subconscious. Whether you thought the sentiment embarrassing or dead-on target, the ads hit a chord.

But “Lamb Side Story” as it is known isn’t about a satiric but loving look at who we are but rather an imagined Australia where multicultural suburbanites and tong-wielding mothers are caught in a trap between caring but shouty lefties on one side and troglodytic, knuckle-dragging righties on the other.

To put it in Freudian terms, the old ads hit us right in the id — that part of the brain that represents the imperfect, instinctual Australian self, not who the world wants us to be but who we really are at heart, love it or hate it.

This year’s ad, though, is all super-ego: socially appropriate, politically correct, and behaving according to the rules set for us not by our parents (as Freud described it) but rather the inner-city creative class whose biggest problem with diversity is too many choices on UberEats.

So, Meat and Livestock Australia, some free advice. Next time you want to make an ad about Australia, make it about who we are, not who you imagine us to be.

Happy Australia Day.

James Morrow is Opinion Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Originally published as Tired meat ads are mutton dressed as lamb