New Zealand, in theory, should be the most fish-confident country on Earth. It is, after all, a nation that cannot walk more than 130 kilometres in any direction without hitting the ocean. But, somehow, the nation has developed a shame complex. Sealord and Motion Sickness think it’s time someone said something.
The new brand platform, ‘We Love Fish’, is built around a phenomenon Sealord has diagnosed as “fishame”—the irrational guilt of the fish lover: that it’s too smelly for the office, too messy for the kitchen, and that eating frozen fish is somehow cheating.
It isn’t hyperbole, either. No protein carries more baggage than fish—somehow always the food everyone has an opinion about.
In partnership with The Sweetshop and Directed by Damien Shatford, the launch film ‘The Manifishto’ follows a weathered Skipper on a mission to cure the nation of fishame, tracking it down in the wild: a man on a bus quietly pocketing an open tin after a nosey teenager clocks him mid-tuna; a woman hiding inside an air conditioning unit after a colleague catches her reheating fish in the office microwave; a kid at the dinner table interrogating his hoki fillet like a customs officer. The Skipper’s solution is simple: hold that fish high and proud, for all to see.
“We know many New Zealanders want to eat more fish, but there are small social and practical barriers that get in the way,” says Melissa Butler, General Manager, Marketing at Sealord. “‘We Love Fish’ celebrates those realities with humour and confidence, while reinforcing Sealord’s role as the brand to make it easier for people to truly love fish.”
“New Zealand is basically one long coastline,” says Will Macdonald, Creative Director at Motion Sickness. “Which means loving fish isn’t really optional. We are biologically engineered to love the stuff. So when the message needed a messenger, there was only ever one candidate: Sealord. This is the first step to normalising public fish-scoffing, and I don’t think it will be the last.”
The platform’s hero film is supported by a suite of assets across TV, digital, social and out-of-home, rolled out nationwide by PHD Aotearoa.
