Bank tried to scrub 'sexy sheep' memes and sent its own mascot even more viral
Kiwibank's new sheep mascot Buck became the centre of viral jokes, fan art and copyright takedowns that only drew more attention.
A New Zealand bank introduced a cartoon sheep to win over customers and ended up with a very different kind of online campaign. After Buck, a green-wool mascot for Kiwibank, became the subject of sexualised jokes and fan art, the bank moved to take posts down, only for the backlash to grow.
Kiwibank unveiled Buck this year as part of an effort to persuade people to move their accounts to the bank. Instead, the character quickly found a second life on X, where users fixated on the sheep's looks and shared jokes that also played on stereotypes about New Zealanders.
The clip below is an ad featuring Buck.
As the posts spread, Kiwibank responded with copyright complaints. In place of some images, viewers were left with the standard platform notice saying the media had been disabled following a report by the copyright owner.
The cleanup attempt became part of the story
Rather than shutting the joke down, the takedowns appear to have pushed it further. The effort to remove the posts prompted more people to make and share their own Buck material, and the situation drew attention beyond New Zealand.
That reaction is the classic problem people refer to as the Streisand Effect, where trying to suppress something makes it more visible. In this case, attempts to contain the attention around Buck only sent more eyes toward the mascot's green curls and the wave of fan-made content built around them.
Kiwibank said it acted because it believed the material had crossed a line. Spokesman Ben Mabon said the bank had been dealing with explicit and harmful content that used Buck's image. He said the concern was serious and that the bank felt it was important to respond. He also acknowledged that the response itself became part of the wider conversation, while maintaining that doing nothing did not seem like the right option because of the nature of the content.
Why critics say the posts may not be so simple to remove
The backlash did not just come from people treating the whole thing as a joke. New Zealand's Free Speech Union criticised the takedowns on censorship grounds and argued that at least some of the targeted posts looked more like parody than infringement.
According to that argument, at least one post used Kiwibank's own advertising image exactly as it appeared, while placing the joke in the caption rather than changing the picture itself. The notices, however, described the posts as sexualised copies that violated Kiwibank's copyright.
The union's view was that, under United States law, material can sometimes be reused without permission when it is being employed for commentary, criticism or parody. On that reading, a joke built around an ad could fall into the kind of use that copyright law allows.
Online reaction showed little sign of embarrassment about the whole Buck phenomenon. One user even suggested that if everyone kept insisting the Kiwibank sheep was attractive, the bank would not be able to stop them all.
For Kiwibank, what began as a mascot launch has turned into a strange modern internet lesson. A bank tried to control how its cartoon sheep was being used online. What followed was a much bigger conversation about jokes, copyright and whether trying to erase a meme only guarantees more people will see it.
