Dairy company faces social media backlash for an advertisement depicting women as cows!

Social media has been ablaze with criticism of a milk conglomerate in South Korea for depicting women as cows in its advertisements. Seoul Milk, one of South Korea’s biggest milk brands, advertises with a video of a man walking through the woods to an idyllic grove while carrying a large camera. He secretly films women drinking clear water from a stream and stretching in a field after arriving in this forested area.

The advert opens with the man narrating his journey through the forest, saying: ‘We were finally able to capture them on camera in a pristine location where nature is preserved in its purest form. They drink clean water from pure nature, consume an eco-friendly organic diet, and live peacefully in a placid environment. I will try to approach them cautiously’.

The filmmaker then snaps a twig and startles his subjects, who have turned into mooing cows. The commercial ends with this tagline: ‘Clean water, organic feed, 100% pure Seoul Milk. Organic milk from an organic ranch in the pleasant nature of Cheongjang’. According to The Korea Herald, the video was first uploaded to Seoul Milk’s official YouTube channel on November 29. On December 8, the ad was removed after social media backlash.

One comment on the Seoul Dairy Cooperative’s Instagram page read, “I will never drink Seoul Milk again. Humans should never be compared to cattle, and spy cams should never be used for advertisement’. Some YouTube commenters on the original video critiqued the ad, stating that it promoted the filming of sexually explicit hidden camera footage, also known as ‘molka’, from screenshots documented by pop-culture website Koreaboo.

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Seoul Milk responded to the swirling controversy on December 8 by releasing a statement online. ‘We sincerely apologize to everyone who felt uncomfortable with the milk commercial,’ read the company’s statement. ‘We are accepting this matter with a heavy heart and will conduct an internal review, and take extra care to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future. We bow our heads in apology’.