Over 70% of the UK’s farmed animals live in unnatural, intensive factory farms, as do 50 billion of the world’s 70 billion farm animals.

World Animal Protection has a small, but highly engaged and passionate following on social media, but had repeatedly failed achieve cut through into mainstream media for any of its recent campaigns. WAP is competing for share of voice with dozens of other animal welfare and environmental charities from global giants with A-list celebrity ambassadors such as WWF and Greenpeace to the shock tactics of PETA. Operating without the budgets, profile or patronage of many of these other organisations, WAP wanted to put factory farming on the national agenda during COP26.

This is when Cow came up with the concept of a factory farm play set, working with Tinderflint to produce the video content. The visceral impact of the content meant it was one of the very few to cut through during COP26, with national features in The Guardian, Daily Star and Independent and a feature on global TV news channel Euronews. Global creativity title Design Taxi ran an impassioned feature in support, PR Week selected it for Five COP Campaigns We Liked and was included in Creative Moment’s Campaigns That Made a Mark in 2021.

The most significant result was when Now This, a global content publisher approached us with a request to re- edit and syndicate the film across its social channels with a combined following of 22 million throughout January 2022. That’s some reach and some long tail.

The project was recently acknowledged at the Drum Marketing Awards by winning the Not For Profit category.

Mark Perkins is Creative & Strategy Director at Cow PR