A nonprofit organization that advocates for measures to stop the global hunger crisis and food insecurity has launched an advertising campaign targeting the $6.2 million sale of a banana taped to a wall in a Sotheby’s auction last week.
The Feed Foundation, created as a philanthropic offshoot of Lauren Bush Lauren’s lifestyle brand Feed Projects, is behind the advertising campaign and shared images to Instagram of a truck with a digital billboard bearing the ad driving past Sotheby’s New York.
“Know what’s bananas? This could feed 62 million people,” the advertisement reads. Amid the text is a photograph of Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), the controversial artwork that sold at Sotheby’s.
The number of people that could be fed with the $6.2 million that crypto king Justin Sun paid for the banana is rooted in a calculation from the organization Feeding America, a partner of the Feed Foundation. Feeding America has previously explained how each dollar donated can be turned into ten meals by the organization.
In the caption for its Instagram post, the Feed Foundation added, “This Thanksgiving, one in eight people do not know where their next meal will come from,” as it sought to solicit donations for its hunger-fighting efforts.
A representative for Imaginary Friends, the creative advertising agency that partners with the Feed Foundation, said on a phone call that the teams started mobilizing the ad the day after the sale—and aimed at spending as little money as possible for the brief campaign.
“It was such an outrageous amount of money,” the Imaginary Friends representative said. “We are all supportive of the arts here. We are a creative agency. But when one-in-eight Americans don’t know where their next meal comes from, we see this as an opportunity to turn around and do something for good.”
The representative said the billboard truck drove around on November 26, circling the big three auction houses—Phillip’s, Christie’s, and Sotheby’s—on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The team hopes the stunt draws enough buzz to get people to donate to the foundation through Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday next week.
“In a dream world, Justin Sun would donate millions to feed,” the representative said of the crypto king who bought the banana.
The post came after a story in The New York Times, which interviewed the owner of the sidewalk fruit vendor located just feet from the famed auction house where its staff members bought the $6.2 million banana for just 35 cents.
“I am a poor man,” said the 74-year-old Shah Alam, the fruit stand vendor, when he was told how much his banana resold for as he began to cry. “I have never had this kind of money; I have never seen this kind of money.”
Meanwhile, grocery stores like the local Family Fare in Byron Center, Michigan, have also sought to capitalize on the banana affair. The grocer shared an image of a turkey taped to the wall ahead of Thanksgiving that it was selling for just 32 cents per pound.
