What's outrageous in the ad? A family of vegetarians, whose son wants to eat meat. But as these vegetarian parents are extremely open-minded, they agree to go to the delicatessen section to offer their son some Aosta ham. That said, the pata negra is good too, but this is an ad for Aosta.
Yes vegetarians are caricatured! Because exaggerating reality is a bit of the principle of humor, they look like old babies, these parents. But when there's a nerd in a pub, he has ugly glasses, greasy hair and eats pizza. While there are beautiful nerds who have had surgery for myopia and who eat perfectly, because they are vegetarians. But that's the principle of humor:play on clichés, magnify the line. And that's basically what the vegetarians are complaining about on Twitter and in the articles. They feel insulted, they are not like that.
If the vegetarians in advertising are open-minded, some of them (we don't say all you notice) on the Internet are much less so. For them we don't have the right to make fun of vegetarians, so Rue89 publishes an article entitled "Hey Aosta, you would like to leave the vegetarians alone" It's true that they have been badly persecuted for millennia the veggies. In outrage bingo, Rue89 wins with 267 comments (currently). You can find the same kind of article on Citizen post. The site takes the opportunity to launch into a diatribe against junk food and extol the benefits for the planet of a vegetarian diet. Better still, we even found not one but two petitions asking for the removal of advertising from French screens. The first petition is here, the second is over there. If we add the two petitions we arrive at 4000 signatures. Not bad!
And finally, there is even a video in response to the ad which parodies it (but was produced under technically poor conditions, and the sound is almost inaudible). Faced with this famous "bad buzz", the brand felt compelled to react by splitting a small stammer on Twitter
It seems like millions have taken to the streets to defend the right to laugh at everything, to laugh at Muslims, Christians, Jews, the fat, the skinny, the meat eaters and the vegetarians. And a priori we must be able to do it in a newspaper, on the web, in a pub, at home. It's a bit of a problem when people think they have a truth, whether religious or behavioral, they can't stand that we don't adhere to their ideas. Fortunately, when we hear in our entourage "I am a vegetarian and I find this ad very funny" we are happy. And there are many tolerant veggies, but the intolerant always make more noise.
