PETA's "Mindful Mobsters" Super Bowl advertisement series is... interesting to say the least.
Nothing says "stop animal abuse" like showing humans abusing each other, I guess? The People for Ethical Treatment of Animals must be going for shock factor during the "Big Game."
They opted to try and appeal to the masses with a mobster feel, and it's not the first time PETA has done that. Just last year, they called upon the services of Edie Falco, famous for her role in The Sopranos, for a commercial that defended mother cows.
This time around, the minds over at PETA's advertising department decided to come up with their own mobster universe. In the series of three videos that pull inspiration from basically any and every mob movie and TV show you can think of, "Mindful Mobsters" Frankie and Joey chastise a younger mobster named Johnny about his wardrobe selection.
In a regular mobster movie, they'd be giving him a hard time about wearing cheap clothes, or something of that nature. In these PETA ads? Frankie and Joey are ripping Johnny apart (figuratively) for wearing a leather jacket, a leather belt and a wool sweater while informing him about the abuse that takes place to make those clothes.
PETA Senior Vice President Lisa Lange had this to say about the run of ad spots that football fans might encounter during the Super Bowl:
"Even tough guys can’t stomach the cruelty and abuse that goes into leather jackets and wool sweaters. PETA encourages everyone to fuhgeddaboud wearing animals’ body parts and stick to vegan materials."
At the base of things, the idea for the commercial isn't all that bad. But the execution comes off as a bit odd, since they show actual human-on-human abuse. Frankie and Joey beat up Johnny in multiple different situations, all because he's wearing clothes that are made from cows and sheep.
This one that features the "Mindful Mobsters" in the middle of dumping a body even shows a person getting shot:
https://youtu.be/plxBTA5VcKY?si=Vk49WgcUoeJQS9SB
Doesn't that come off as a little weird?
I guess they are trying to portray abuse in an attempt to tap into that feeling of "that's not right," thus hopefully making people feel the same about the process that goes into making clothes from animals? That's the best way I can explain it...
In my opinion, it all comes off a little heavy handed. Here's another one where the Johnny character appears to be suffering from a gunshot wound, and while Frankie tries to help him clean it up in the back of a moving vehicle, he discovers that Johnny is wearing a wool sweater, which PETA claims is made by abusing sheep.
So Frankie hits the sh*t out of an already suffering Johnny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7_jbVeyOE4&t=2s
And the lessons for Johnny - and the audience PETA is trying to reach - continued in the final installment of their "Mindful Mobsters" ad series. Remember the leather belt I mentioned earlier? That comes into play in the clip below, which features Frankie and Joey condemning Johnny for tying up the guy they were torturing with a leather belt.
It all comes off just as cringey as the others:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6O2a-UTgiY&t=1s
Sheesh, PETA is insufferable...
Of course, the ironic part of all of this is that 95% of the people who are going to see this on Super Bowl Sunday will probably be stuffing their faces with some sort of animal meat products... beef sliders, pigs in a blanket, chicken wings.
Folks across the country will likely be sitting on their leather couches, wearing their wool sweaters, with a gut full of every animal on the farm, and this dumb PETA ad will show up on the screen... and my bet is that they'll be too full to pay attention to the ad that PETA spent $25 million on that probably failed to change anyone's mind.
