Sam Cadman Reflects on His Hard-Hitting Animal Welfare Campaign

“Our aim is simple, to put an end to factory farming within a generation.”

These are the words of Philip Lymbery, chief executive of the animal welfare charity Compassion in World Farming and author of the eye-opening books Farmageddon and Dead Zone.

It was late last year, having read these two books, that I first asked CIWF if they had any footage of the farming hell-holes and animal atrocities Philip mentioned. And, if so, would they be open to me re-editing this material specifically for social media in order to reach a wider, younger and more digital audience?

As powerful as Philip’s book were, it seemed to me that the right digital content had the potential to reach a much larger audience and could be done so for a fraction of the price. If the video material already existed, it seemed like a no-brainer, I could comb through it all and then repurpose the most compelling moments for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 

Fortunately, CIWF said “Yes” and “Yes”, and so began an exciting - yet sobering - creative process to create a series of single-image memes, three-second gifs and 15-second Facebook Live films. I wanted images that would stop your thumb in its tracks, that would grab the attention of anyone, not just the converted, but do so with an accessible and ‘suitable-for-work’ tone. 

With the help of digital editor Dominic Stoppani, this quickly led to the creation of our despondent emojis; bright yellow happy faces that were now crying, becoming red with anger and green with nausea. I liked the tension here, between such distressing images and the normally light-hearted emoji iconography.

I also had a nagging doubt that with a lot of animal cruelty footage, the longer you watch it the easier it seemed to simply tune out. Three-second gifs were a way to deal with this atrophy, as were the unfunny memes that we made next.

The bold comic text and casual office humour that’s synonymous with most memes felt ripe for a similar tension and unease. And finally, the Facebook Live films allowed us to replace the usual stream of love hearts and thumbs ups, with scowls, anger and tears.

The campaign has only just launched so we await the results, but this has been an exciting project that for relatively little money has created a significant body of custom-made work for an eager online audience.

As creative director, it’s been satisfying to tackle the genre of animal welfare with such a fresh and unexpected approach and it’s a testament to CIWF that the opportunity was found to be there in the first place.

Indeed, if there’s anyone else out there sitting on a pile of lifeless and neglected material, whatever the business, I’d love to know.