This has kicked up quite a stink in the UK.
Basically, Iceland, one of Britain's smaller supermarket chains, selling mostly frozen foods, attempted to run a Christmas campaign this year that drew attention to the plight of the planet's rainforests and rainforest animals as a result of the destruction of said forests for the growth of Palm oil plantations. Iceland does not use Palm oil in its products, you see, but almost every other food retailer does.
To provide some perspective: in another example of unintended consequences, the campaign to eliminate toxic trans-fatty acids from fast foods and junk food around the turn of the century resulted in large multinational food corporations like Nestle, Kraft/Mondelez, Kelloggs, Mars, Danone and Unilver replacing them with Palm oil.
The wonder of Palm oil is that it doesn't oxidise easily, and makes an ideal replacement for trans-fatty acids, which means junk food can be kept for longer in their nasty disposable plastic packaging, thus boosting profit margins, but without harming health as badly as TFAs did (apart from, like, obesity, diabetes, inflammation and death from poor health). Butter could, of course, be used instead of either, but that would harm said profit margins even further.
Anyway, in the UK we have a culture of Christmas advertising that doesn't necessarily relate directly to the retailer. It's all about emotional connection, or some such marketing nonsense, and creates a huge brand salience. The John Lewis partnership generally 'wins' this advertising contest, and such ads are estimated to add as much as 25-30% to Christmas sales, though occasionally others have taken the annual Christmas advert crown like Sainsbury's with their Mog's Christmas Calamity advert.
So this year Iceland attempted to run an 'emotional' campaign of its own, devoid of both its own brand and that of Greenpeace, who ultimately provided the cartoon they used for their campaign. Unfortunately, and despite removing the Greenpeace logo and even their own, the semi-privatised British industry body now responsible for TV advertising standards decided that Iceland's ad "breeched" rules on political advertising.
Well, this judgement went down like a lead-balloon, which is rather unsurprising given the fact that the advert literally does not contain Greenpeace's logo, and so should in theory, therefore, have avoided being censored.
This is the terrible, politically outrageous, dangerous and censored advert they wanted to run:
And here's some discussion on it:
Iceland Christmas advert banned for being too political
Body that rejected Iceland Christmas ad 'faced storm of abuse'
Iceland Christmas ad: Petition to show it on TV hits 670k
Iceland Christmas advert 'ban' a 'misunderstanding', says advisory body
*******
Suffice it to say: Iceland have proven themselves to be quite the marketing geniuses in getting their advert banned. It's given them vastly more coverage than they could ever have hoped for, while at the same time letting everyone know they don't sell products that require an environmental catastrophe to bring to market.
Perhaps they paid someone to ban it after all?
Basically, Iceland, one of Britain's smaller supermarket chains, selling mostly frozen foods, attempted to run a Christmas campaign this year that drew attention to the plight of the planet's rainforests and rainforest animals as a result of the destruction of said forests for the growth of Palm oil plantations. Iceland does not use Palm oil in its products, you see, but almost every other food retailer does.
To provide some perspective: in another example of unintended consequences, the campaign to eliminate toxic trans-fatty acids from fast foods and junk food around the turn of the century resulted in large multinational food corporations like Nestle, Kraft/Mondelez, Kelloggs, Mars, Danone and Unilver replacing them with Palm oil.
The wonder of Palm oil is that it doesn't oxidise easily, and makes an ideal replacement for trans-fatty acids, which means junk food can be kept for longer in their nasty disposable plastic packaging, thus boosting profit margins, but without harming health as badly as TFAs did (apart from, like, obesity, diabetes, inflammation and death from poor health). Butter could, of course, be used instead of either, but that would harm said profit margins even further.
Anyway, in the UK we have a culture of Christmas advertising that doesn't necessarily relate directly to the retailer. It's all about emotional connection, or some such marketing nonsense, and creates a huge brand salience. The John Lewis partnership generally 'wins' this advertising contest, and such ads are estimated to add as much as 25-30% to Christmas sales, though occasionally others have taken the annual Christmas advert crown like Sainsbury's with their Mog's Christmas Calamity advert.
So this year Iceland attempted to run an 'emotional' campaign of its own, devoid of both its own brand and that of Greenpeace, who ultimately provided the cartoon they used for their campaign. Unfortunately, and despite removing the Greenpeace logo and even their own, the semi-privatised British industry body now responsible for TV advertising standards decided that Iceland's ad "breeched" rules on political advertising.
Well, this judgement went down like a lead-balloon, which is rather unsurprising given the fact that the advert literally does not contain Greenpeace's logo, and so should in theory, therefore, have avoided being censored.
This is the terrible, politically outrageous, dangerous and censored advert they wanted to run:
And here's some discussion on it:
Iceland Christmas advert banned for being too political
Body that rejected Iceland Christmas ad 'faced storm of abuse'
Iceland Christmas ad: Petition to show it on TV hits 670k
Iceland Christmas advert 'ban' a 'misunderstanding', says advisory body
*******
Suffice it to say: Iceland have proven themselves to be quite the marketing geniuses in getting their advert banned. It's given them vastly more coverage than they could ever have hoped for, while at the same time letting everyone know they don't sell products that require an environmental catastrophe to bring to market.
Perhaps they paid someone to ban it after all?
. 
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")