Sacrilegious Ice Cream of Sin
Let’s stray away from personal art and blogging escapades for a moment. I’ll get back to it, I promise. But I’ve gotten busier, and I’m at that point in my education where assignments start to blend in with each other. Or, maybe I just need to sleep more…
Recently, I was looking for a marketing campaign to analyze for another class. As I was scrolling through my various social media dashboards, my thoughts were halted by the sight of a surprising campaign for gelato.
Catholic priests and nuns engaging in traditionally profane acts? Who greenlit this? I’ll answer that for you: Contrast Creative, a UK based agency. They wanted to tap into the client’s Italian roots and make an impression on customers. Turns out sacrilegious ice cream is the right amount of chaos that the company can stir up. Not only was the campaign featured in The Colbert Report, but it was also quickly banned by the ASA.
I was raised Catholic. My mother is a stickler when it comes to praying often and attending church. I went to a Catholic elementary school followed by Catholic high school where the influence of this religion was difficult to avoid.
I find this campaign hilarious. Same-sex couples almost kissing, a nun moving in on a chiseled priest… it’s all this religious symbolism wrapped in supposed blasphemy. Any pearl-clutching traditional Catholic like my mom would be startled.
However, regardless of the passage of time and the ever-changing public subconscious, making light of a religion is a one way ticket to heavy controversy. It’s also exactly why it became a viral sensation.
The Golden Gates of Virality
Libert and Tynski highlight that tapping into strong emotions such as anticipation and surprise can make a piece of content go viral. To a lot of people, the sight of a pregnant nun is shocking. There’s added confusion, too: all the irreverence is simply for selling gelato. The “Ice Cream is Our Religion” campaign certainly achieved its goal of making an impression on potential customers everywhere.
That campaign was shut down in 2010, right before Instagram was created later that year. I saw it recently because the person who posted it used the right tags, then someone I followed reposted it in turn. Thousands of people have interacted with that post. Jodie Dublin-Dangleben, the self-made CEO of Jaydee’s Naturals, believes simplicity, the right tags, and the right keywords contribute to viral content. Using the best suited platform and tools for people to find emotionally arousing content can circulate social media faster. Striking words like “immaculately conceived” paired with a pregnant nun can definitely capture someone’s attention. This campaign seems right at home in a humor-based economy site like Tumblr.
I showed these pictures to my friends. We were all disappointed (but not surprised) that the gelato doesn’t exist anymore. We’d buy their entire stock.