Inspired Farewell to “The Other White Meat”

A tip of the snout to alert reader John “Shave That Swine” Shaver, who tipped me off to the latest news from the National Pork Board.  Gone is the two and a half decade “The Other White Meat” ad campaign, which focused on comparing pork to chicken.  The Board’s new, improved slogan? “Pork: Be Inspired.”
An Associated Press article on the inspirational new campaign notes that the average American eats roughly 50 pounds of pork per year (I have always thought of myself as above average and this statistic does nothing to dissuade me).  That’s about half a hog’s worth of pork.  
Almost 70 percent of the pork consumed at home in the U.S. can be attributed to just 28% of households, undoubtedly many of which are located in North Carolina and other southern states.  
Ceci Snyder, the National Pork Board’s vice president of marketing, is quoted by the article saying: “The overall goal is to move sales of our product.  We want to increase pork sales by 10% by 2014. To do that, we needed to make a stronger connection, a more emotional connection to our product.”  Snyder goes on to say that targeting existing pork eaters is the strategy for increasing pork sales.  In case you are reading this article, Ms. Snyder, I am already doing my part but I promise to redouble my efforts.

BBQ on TV?

Dear Loyal Readers,

You recently enlightened me on the topic of BBQ in mall food courts and I once again need to drink from your well of wisdom.  When traveling in the Greenville area not too long ago I noticed a Skylight Inn ad on television.  As you’d expect, it was a pretty low budget ad, which featured the tagline: “It’s a barbecue fact, not fiction, wood cooked barbecue smokes the competition.”  Needless to say, there was nothing particularly exciting about the ad… except that I’d never seen a TV ad for a NC barbecue place before. 

I asked Samuel Jones of the Skylight Inn about the ad and he said they’d started running it relatively recently and that it was paying big dividends in drawing in more customers (I guess that is the point of ads, so I am not sure why this fact surprised me but it did).  Anyway, I’m curious whether other North Carolina BBQ joints have run TV spots. An exhaustive/exhausting three minute search of You Tube proved fruitless (porkless?), but I imagine some of the bigger joints must advertise on local stations.  Please englighten me.

Your’s in our shared quest to educate the world about every obscure detail of North Carolina barbecue culture,

Porky