Manitou considers putting PETA bikini ad on trash cans
Colorado Springs residents may see ads in parks that feature a blonde in a lettuce-leaf bikini after all.
Manitou Springs is considering the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ offer to pay to advertise on trash cans in parks, a proposal Colorado Springs turned down last month.
After Colorado Springs passed on PETA’s offer, a member of the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board in Manitou Springs reached out to the animal-rights group, which offered to pay Manitou Springs $2,500 to advertise on its trash cans.
Manitou Mayor Marc Snyder said Thursday that he had “penciled in” a discussion about the offer for the City Council’s June 8 work session.
“I haven’t seen any of the materials yet, so that’s why I say it’s penciled in. If they’re serious about this and want to submit something and maybe have somebody there to talk about it with us, then we’ll probably go ahead and have it on the work session,” he said.
“If it’s just another kind of PR-type of thing, then we probably won’t even take it up,” Snyder said.
PETA spokeswoman Lindsay Rajt said PETA’s serious.
“We would love to run our ads on the trash cans in Manitou Springs,” Rajt said.
The ad, which shows a bikini-clad blonde and the slogan, “Meat Trashes the Planet. Go Vegan. PETA,” was too hot for Colorado Springs.
“The verbiage promoting a specific agenda — ‘anti-beef’ — was not appropriate, and the lettuce-leaf bikini was not rated for general audiences,” Colorado Springs spokeswoman Sue Skiffington-Blumberg said last month in an e-mail.
Rajt said the ad is meant to get people “excited” about saving animals.
“I would like to think that we could just put text on a trash can and that everyone would walk by and read it and be enthralled and think deeply about it for months to come and go vegan,” she said.
“Unfortunately, I think that we live in more of a tabloid society, and we have to do provocative things to get people’s attention,” she said.
Snyder said he suspects council members wouldn’t support the same ad.
“We want our parks to be family-friendly and user-friendly and welcoming to everybody,” he said. “So if you start politicizing even the spaces of your trash cans, you might find yourself alienating certain groups, and that’s the last thing we want to do with our parks.”
Councilwoman Aimee Cox, who works for the Colorado Springs Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services Department, said Manitou might be open to such ads.
“The issue in Manitou is we don’t have any sponsorship programs or anything along those lines, so we weren’t sure how to make something like that work or if there was community interest,” she said. “That’s why we’re bringing it back for a work session, to determine if this is appropriate for our parks, how much a sponsorship would cost so we could appropriately open it up to everybody if this is something we want to do.
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