• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, August 3, 2011

Aw, c'mon. This is what Perdue has come to? A press release that announces "Perdue Survey Reveals Busy Americans Devote Extra Time to Putting a Great Meal on the Dinner Table" and a Facebook contest to "find Americans' best chicken dishes"?

No wonder the account is in review after a "40-year relationship with Deutsch and its predecessor shops," as Maureen McGovern reports in Ad Age.

To be fair, the contest is as much a part of Perdue's "We Believe in a Better Chicken™" campaign as a leg is to a breast, which is to say that it is attached. More about the grizzle of that campaign, which launched last month, later. For now, let's stick to what the contest release reveals: It "underscores the company's commitment to going above and beyond, with programs such as the USDA Processed Verified Seal, to deliver the best possible poultry products for consumers."

Will you give me a break, please? As we all know, "It Takes a Tough Man ..." And that's all we needed to know.

Regarding the breakup with Deutsch, a Perdue spokeswoman says, "the motivation for the search is to consolidate marketing services for greater integration and efficiency." But, McGovern writes, "a person familiar with the matter said the account went up for review due to fair compensation constantly being a debate." No matter how you carve it, the bottom line, it appears, is the bottom line.

The stories of Frank Perdue's ventures to the Big Apple to strategize and cut commercials at Scali McCabe Sloves in the Seventies and Eighties are legendary, but I never paid much attention to them so I got nothing for you on that score, so to speak. What we all know is that the campaign that came out of those forays is on everybody's list of the top creative efforts of all time.

The new spots, the New York Times' Stuart Elliott wrote last month, "eschew the humorous tone that Perdue Farms has often taken in its pitches, replacing it with an earnest approach rooted in reality -- or as real as ads can get. In addition to including employees, the spots are set at actual Perdue Farms facilities and discuss how the chickens are raised."

The documentary approach is a reaction to consumers' increasing concern about the quality of the foods they eat and their desire to do business with companies they view as transparent, Elliott explains.

"In discussing how Perdue Farms treats its chickens, the campaign promotes a seal the company received from the Agriculture Department under what is called process-verified programs, which enable companies selling agricultural products or services to make marketing claims in areas like the raising and feeding of animals," he writes.

But "Perdue's claims are marketing hype," food watchdog Marion Nestle writes in her Food Politics blog. "This is not, as you might expect, an inspection program to make sure that food producers are doing what they claim," she says. "No, USDA's Process Verification is a marketing program that allows producers to make claims and create certification logos."

Meanwhile, everywhere I cluck ... er, click, lately, there seems to be a story on how to build your own chicken coop, from GRIT's 2011 Guide to Backyard Chickens to Kris Maher's piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that carried the flighty hed: "Cooped Up: Chickens Come Home to Roost for Urbanites With a Yen for Hen." The subhed read, "As Hobbyists Feather Own Nests, City Dwellers Flock to Tour Backyard Henhouses."

The birds in these hen houses are, presumably, for egg-laying more than consumption (although who's to say what goes on in the neighbor's backyard?) Within you will briefly meet some chickens who border on pets and carry such names as Buffy-the-Wormslayer, Attila-the-Hen and Motherclucker.

Meanwhile, the Pew Environment Group, a nonprofit advocacy group, has issued a report that calls for limits on the density of animal production "especially in areas without alternatives to managing the animal waste," according to a story at  Delmarvanow.com, the website for the The Daily Times of Salisbury, Md.

"The environmental consequences of the broiler business' explosive growth are especially profound in the Chesapeake Bay, one of the nation's most important, scenic and threatened bodies of water," Pew's Robert Martin says in a release accompanying "Big Chicken: Pollution and Industrial Poultry Production in America." The industry response is that the report "seems to be unaware of the scope of environmental progress under way in the poultry community" and that it is "a cheap shot at a responsible business."

Tofu and hand-gathered scrambled eggs, anyone?