Last but not least: Horsy funny
The Swiss advertising industry is one of the winners of the horse gate. But now is good. If someone would think about the much-discussed Romanian horses for slaughter, there would be little to laugh about anyway.
The horse fun craze started in 2013 with classic Facebook pictures: A bull mounting a horse and saying, "Hold still - Let's make a burger!". Unfunny. Galloping wild horses shouting "Let's run before they Findus!". Starting to be funny. On Thursday, the new horse humor reached a first peak: Blick Online headlined "Trotz Lasagne Pferdi - Schweizer stürmen Pferdemetzg". Funny (without irony!).
Horse vertisement - a Swiss national sport
The advertising industry picked up on the topic early on and seized the opportunity: Streuplan teased the Hero competition ("We don't want to harp on it, but...") and made people forget the ravioli scandal that Roger Schawinski had uncovered at the end of the 1970s in "Kassensturz," which he had invented (!). The late rehabilitation of canned ravioli.
Hiltl, the mother of all vegetarian restaurants, also reacted promptly and pointed out the Rössli-free lasagna. However, the assembly was brand self-made and had nothing to do with the house agency Ruf Lanz. The zenith of the horse euphoria and hysteria was already exceeded when yesterday Monday first Contexta for Appenzeller cheese and then Rod Kommunikation for Mini ignited the neighing final bouquet. Even if the topic was slowly worn out - one had to laugh nevertheless from the missing horse milk and the 218 lasagna thicknesses. The cheese was not only a record-breaking 45 times over the Advertising Week Facebook Page but also appeared today in the Horse summary from Horizont.net (the compilation consists mostly of Swiss creations - even Hiltl's brave Photoshop attempts made it to the biggest German-language communication stage). But that's enough now anyway, pfertig lustig!
The Talkbacking Angry Citizen in Top Form
The lasagna scandal also generated an incredible commentary response on the news pages. Horsemeat is healthier and better than beef anyway, was said in every second article. Also widespread was the original approach that people would have bought an extra supply of frozen lasagna if they had known about the horsemeat content earlier. With the topic meat the rage citizen usually runs up to the high form - this last bastion one does not want to be taken also still by vegetarians, leftists, nice ones and other Weltverbesserern. Rarely anyone had reservations about eating an animal slaughtered in Romania under dubious (according to SDA even mafia-like) conditions - as long as it is declared as the animal it was before the meat grinder and before the journeys across Europe. And even when the Oerlikon horse butcher in above-mentioned View article stressed that he would never process horsemeat from Eastern Europe ("Often these are working animals that are treated quite badly"), the most popular comment was: "Coop would have been better to put a sticker on the packaging "may contain horsemeat" and sell the lasagna for half the price, zero problemo...".
Zero problemo! By the way: "Kassensturz" - once invented by Roger Schawinski, in case you didn't know it yet - shows in today's edition a contribution that also deals with the horse hype. Topic: "Cruelty to animals on horse farms: Merciless meat production". Most of the horsemeat on the shelves of Swiss retailers, by the way, comes from such places, one learns. Perhaps even for the media a welcome broadening of horizons: Despite all the hysteria - no one thought of the actual protagonists during the whole debate.
Thomas Häusermann
