Conflict between generations is nothing new. Old people can’t tell a scam email from a real email and are constantly complaining. Young people are too sucked into technology to pay attention to the real world. Those in between struggle with the existential cloud of cultural irrelevance. What could possibly help bridge these seemingly insurmountable differences?
According to Meat & Livestock Australia, the answer might just be some BBQ lamb.
In what’s become an annual tradition from the country’s meat industry marketer around Australia Day (January 26), this year’s spot is called “Generation Gap” and depicts a world where the generations are separated by actual fault lines. The old folks live in Boomer Town, where the daily newspaper is still delivered and home ownership is basically free. Gen Z are tied up in their tech, but happy not to be in their 30s. And Gen X, well, no one wants to hear from them.
Created by Accenture Song agency The Monkeys, the goal of the ad was to position lamb as a tasty, cultural common denominator. Graeme Yardy, domestic market manager at Meat and Livestock Australia, told Mumbrella, there’s far more that unites than separates us. “Whether it’s a love of our sporting heroes or our beautiful landscapes, the best of Australia always brings us together, and what better way to break down the generational divide than over an epic Aussie lamb BBQ—the ultimate unifier!” said Yardy.
Positioning any consumer product as a salve for societal ills is obviously bonkers, but certainly not a new concept in advertising. The prototype is Coke’s 1971 “Hilltop” ad, which famously solved racism and global conflict, and decades later served as a perfect ending to Mad Men. Pepsi tried to play this card in 2017 with an ad starring Kendall Jenner, who calmly quelled tension between police and protesters with a can of sugar water. That ad was rightly pilloried, spoofed by SNL, and quickly pulled.
The best example might be another 2017 spot, Heineken’s “Worlds Apart,” which cleverly matched people with opposing views together. A white, right-wing antifeminist was paired with a liberal woman of color, an environmental activist with a climate-change denier, and a trans woman met a man who says that being trans is “not right.” As Rob Walker wrote for Fast Company in 2022, this ad was actually one of the top-scoring tools in reducing partisan animosity among subjects in a major Stanford study designed to identify “successful interventions to strengthen Americans’ democratic attitudes.”
So, hey, maybe lamb can work, too?
It hasn’t cured all conflict just yet, though. Some Aussies are complaining that lamb has gone woke because the ad doesn’t explicitly acknowledge Australia Day.
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