Carlos Veron | Love / 2014 [commercial advertisement]

turning hate into love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathan Lennon (copywriter), Carlos Veron (director) Love / 2014 [1.43 minutes] [commercial advertisement]

 

In 2014 the Honey Maid company, maker of Honey Maid graham crackers, and part of the Nabisco Company, launched a series of ads under the general heading of “This Is Wholesome.” Perhaps the first of these was a general view of various new versions of family life, which included gay men, mixed marriages, and single dads of various races and social types.

     The company, perhaps as expected, received some very negative responses to these commercials, just as Coca-Cola had in response to their Superbowl ad of the same year, “It’s Beautiful” which argued that people of different ethnicities and cultures and a family with two dads were all-American.

     But instead of simply grinning and bearing the negative response or turning away from their original campaign, the Honey Maid executives, certainly with the help of their advertising agency Droga5, gathered up all the negative responses and asked two artists to create a work of art with the printouts.

 

      Carefully rolling them up into cylinder-like cones, they arranged them to spell out the word “Love.” But going even further, the company, who made another commercial documenting their actions, noted that there were far many thousands of more positive responses, which the artists, also rolling them up into small cylinders used to surround the word “Love,” symbolically creating a positive force field to their original transformation of the negative into love.

 

     It is estimated that over 1.5 million people saw the ad.

     I have described the original two ads below.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2024