Frozen food company Birds Eye, producer of frozen chicken, fish, and meat-based ready meals, has launched a £2 million vegan meat ad campaign.
Earlier this year, Birds Eye launched its first vegan meat range in the UK at Tesco and Asda. The line, which is called Green Cuisine, includes plant-based burger patties, meatballs, and sausages.
Birds Eye launched a media campaign called “Whoops, I’m a Bit Veggie!” to promote the range. An ad produced by Grey London will air on national TV in the UK through the summer.
“Our Green Cuisine range has performed really well in the short period since its launch and has taken Birds Eye into a new product category,” Steve Challouma, Marketing Director at Birds Eye, said in a statement. “We wanted to embrace that change with a different creative approach to how we communicate the range.”
Birds Eye’s Vegan Meat Ad
The ad shows a room full of vampires at “Vampcon.” “I’ll have one of those meaty burgers please,” one vampire requests at a burger stand.
“They’re meat-free burgers actually,” the server says, and the room falls silent in shock. The vampires then confess that they are “a little bit veggie” since they like the burgers so much.
The ad advertizes that the burgers are “so meaty you’ll be surprised they’re not.”
Challouma commented, “The tongue-in-cheek tagline perfectly encapsulates the overall consumer trend towards meat-free eating, while poking a little fun at some established stereotypes around ‘typical’ meat eaters.”
He continued, “With many people increasingly happy to alternative between meat products and vegetarian alternatives, we’re confident the campaign will appeal to our core audience and help raise awareness of the Green Cuisine range.”
Dan Cole and Andy Garnett, Creative Directors Grey London, acknowledged that introducing a vegan range into a “very crowded market” could prove difficult. “So we needed something that would stand out a mile and have some real bite – and didn’t take itself too seriously,” they said.
They added, “Fooling the most die-hard meat-eaters in the universe with the great taste of these veggie burgers was a fun and memorable way to do this – and will hopefully soon have thousands of meat lovers saying ‘Whoops I’m a bit veggie’ too.”
Recent research found that 98 percent of the people buying plant-based meat are meat-eaters.
