Our campus saw a remarkable stroke of public relations genius on Monday afternoon. A group of students was able to bring a significant amount of attention to its issue at a relatively low cost and with a little help from specialists in outrageous publicity stunts.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals brought its latest anti-meat campaign to campus and was able to parlay just another Student Services Lawn demonstration into a confrontation fit for the evening news.
The campaign, called "the Holocaust on your plate," involved huge banners erected on Student Services Lawn depicting piles of dead Holocaust victims alongside piles of dead chicken carcasses.
The inference, naturally, is that the mass killing of chickens for food is no different than the mass extermination of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. In other words, as the flier points out, "to animals, our people are Nazis."
According to PETA, "As observers walk around the display, they will gain an understanding of the common roots of victimization and violence, and how they can help fight these injustices through decisions that they make every time they eat."
Either that, or get really pissed off. Either way, it brings the desired attention to the issue, and that's the goal. PETA may claim that its goal is to provoke thought, but the nature of the advertising campaigns suggests that the overarching goal is doing whatever necessary to gain media exposure. And gain it did.
In fact, a Channel 3 camera crew arrived just in time to catch a most articulate ASU student tearing down the PETA display and roundly cursing its curators. One must ask why "the place with more stuff" even bothered to show up in the first place.
Valley news stations have not generally shown a willingness to give airtime to student assemblies that have become commonplace on campus. But when PETA comes to town, there's a story.
PETA relies on its reputation as a troublemaker to raise awareness of its issues. "Holocaust on your plate" is not an isolated occurrence. On Friday, a woman in Knoxville, Tenn., painted her naked body like a tiger and spent the afternoon in a cage in order to protest animal cruelty in circuses.
A Thanksgiving ad has a turkey taking a grocery store hostage and informing the customers that innocent animals will have their throats slashed and be boiled alive.
An anti-fur ad shows a man beating a woman to the ground and taking her fur coat, and then poses the question: "How would you like to be killed for your coat?"
Some ads are downright hilarious. An ad promoting the spaying and neutering of pets is simply 30 seconds of cats having sex after the master of the house steps out for a moment. The soundtrack really makes this one.
All these ads have one thing in common: All received high amounts of publicity because they either offended large numbers of people or were outright banned by networks.
PETA's media strategy has reached a point where the "thought-provoking" content of the ads or other material is no longer important. The goal is not to provoke serious dialogue but to offend and incense, which, in our culture, will undoubtedly lead to media attention.
"Holocaust on your plate" is a perfect example of this strategy. Even if nobody but the ASU student body and faculty had seen its display on the Student Services Lawn, that's still just shy of 60,000 people. By making it so egregious as to incite one person to attack it, PETA got itself on the news with its issue in front of the eyeballs of the entire Valley.
But as successful as the exposure strategy is, its value to the cause is questionable. By employing such incendiary images as those of Holocaust victims, PETA risks turning the ire of the citizenry - not against chicken farmers but against itself.
The organization attempts to inoculate itself against this by stating that a Jewish philanthropist who realized the parallels between the slaughter of Jews and the slaughter of animals conceived this ad campaign; but somehow I don't think that fact will be enough.
A strategy composed purely of inflammatory tactics is ultimately ineffective because it's devoid of any real policy proposals. PETA is essentially a fundamentalist organization hoping to win over converts for its cause. Its media strategy embodies its basic belief that society should apply the same ethical standard across the board to animals as it does to people. Hence, the Holocaust parallel makes perfect sense to its members.
But the fact remains that most people are not willing to go there with PETA. As long as this is the case, both advertising campaigns and the message will stir up plenty of controversy but achieve little actual reform.
Chris Kotterman is a journalism and political science senior. Reach him at chris.kotterman@asu.edu.
