Ad Mavericks

Say you’re a large national bank with a group of clients that you have more than a billion dollars worth of business with.  Now say an organization that opposes the business your clients do comes to you and wants to develop an affinity credit card program where people who use those credit cards can help the organization raise money … money that will be used to lobby and market against your billion dollar clients.  What do you do?  Hmmm.  Tough one huh?

Well that’s essentially what is going on between Bank of America, the U.S. cattle industry and an organization called the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).  Over recent years, HSUS has made it their mission to eliminate the livestock industry by lobbying very hard for laws and ballot initiatives that make it difficult to make a living raising farm animals.  In fact, they demonize the industry by describing these farm operations as “factory farms” and pointing out facts about the percentage of greenhouse gasses created by animals.  Here’s a little news:  animals have been creating greenhouse gasses since the days they started walking the earth!

HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle spends more on agricultural animal rights than this picture would lead you to believe.

At the same time, HSUS, despite its name, owns or operates no animal shelters, has no relation to local humane societies that take in stray animals and spends very little of its money on supporting local humane societies.  Their marketing efforts are at best, very misleading.

Which leads us back to Bank of America.  While their letter claims they are checking into it, their thousands of cattle (and undoubtedly other livestock clients) are fuming over their affiliation with a group that opposes their work.  Farmers are pretty good about letting their money talk for them – and my guess is that Bank of America will soon be hoping to replace a billion dollars in business by marketing to deceived pet owners.

Congrats Bank of America and Humane Society of America … You are our Worst of the Week.

Author: Tom Flynn III

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