The Impact of Vegan Billboards

Jordi Casamitjana, the author fo the book "Ethical Vegan", looks at the vegan outreach tactic of using billboards, and how impactful they really are.

Attention is a precious thing.

In the increasingly busy world we live today, with an explosion of information and an extravaganza of consumer offers, attention is almost as valuable as money. If you get people’s attention, not only can you get their money, but their votes, their work, and even their love. And when everyone is fighting for attention, bigger and louder ways to demand it may win. And it doesn’t get much bigger than a street billboard.

The thing about billboards is that it’s difficult to miss them. You may have a strong will and try not to look when you see one coming, but they are big and strategically placed right there in your eye line, so it requires a conscious effort from you to ignore them. You can always pass by a leafleteer with not even a glance at the tiny leaflet she may be trying to hand to you, and you can turn the page of a magazine ignoring anything that is not an article. But a billboard is out there, shouting at you - “look at me!” - and you, naturally, look. This is why I imagine that some non-vegans may feel a bit annoyed if they catch themselves looking — as if they were deceived somehow — if they have previously been dismissing vegan messages as propaganda; as if they lost a battle for attention.

I wonder if billboards work. As a method of vegan outreach, do billboards reach people who, after the experience, change their attitude regarding veganism, and become more open-minded about it? Has anyone become vegan because they saw a vegan billboard? Of all the tactics at the disposal of the vegan movement, billboards are not the cheapest, so it makes sense to ask the question of how effective they are.

I will never have the experience of seeing a vegan billboard as a non-vegan. I was already vegan when I saw my first, so I felt glad and proud of the advances of the vegan movement. I don’t know how I would have felt if I wasn’t a vegan. Curious, incredulous, interested, annoyed? I guess it would have depended on when in my life I saw it. If I had been close to becoming vegan, I may have had quite a different reaction than when I was a full vegan-ignorant carnist. I will never know.

It’s not that I don’t have experience with vegan billboards. I have seen several, and I was part of the team that posed for the cameras when we unveiled the Team Badger’s billboard against the UK government’s sanctioned, ill-fated badger cull — ok, it was not about veganism itself, but close enough.

So, for me to evaluate the impact of billboards on vegan outreach, I would have to rely on other sources beyond my own experience. I will have to ask those who have decided to use them in their campaigns.

But before that, I better look at the history of the use of billboarding in veganism.

The history of vegan billboards

I don’t think I would ever find the first billboard about veganism, even if I find someone claiming it may be.

But I could find the first in particular places. Regarding the UK, one of the candidates for the first vegan billboard was the one seen in Bristol produced by Veg- FestUK.

I have indeed found a Vegnews article published on 22nd May 2016 with the title “UK’s First-Ever Vegan Billboards Go Up” talking about it. It says “In what’s being described as the United Kingdom’s first vegan billboard campaign, the group Pig Freud has plastered educational posters on streets, buses, and building facades — all displaying images of farmed animals such as pigs, chicks, calves, and fish in an attempt to ‘get humans thinking about the source and cost of animal-derived foods — and whether they should go vegan.’ The campaign was launched in conjunction with VegfestUK in Bristol, which was held this past weekend.”

Below: A mock up of what the original VegfestUK billboard would have looked like in 2016, jointly in promotion of veganism and a vegan event.

The other contestant for the first vegan billboard in the UK may be from a campaign of the Irish-based organisation Go Vegan World. Sandra Higgins, the founder of Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary Ireland and Director of Go Vegan World, says that theirs was in 2016 too. In any event, she started her ad campaign in Ireland in 2015, and included much more than one or two billboards. So, Go Vegan World may have been one of the first in Europe to use a vegan billboard, but definitively the first that launched a big vegan advertising campaign with multiple billboards, bus stop ads and bus ads in several cities in different countries. I contacted her, and she said the following: “Go Vegan World was the first campaign of its kind in Europe. It launched in Ireland in 2015 to tremendous success and opened in the UK in 2016. It has since appeared in Canada and runs thousands of billboards and other ads every year, targeting millions of people.”

However, I have found an earlier one. On 11th April 2012, PETA UK unveiled a billboard in the English city of Gloucester showing a meat pie in the shape of a coffin and reading “Not Ready to Meat Your Maker? Fight Obesity: Go Vegan.” Yvonne Taylor said in a PETA statement “PETA’s new billboard highlights how meat pies and pasties will not only pile on the pounds but also result in a premature visit to the mortuary. The best thing that coffin dodgers can do for their health and to help animals is to go vegan.”

Below: One of many Go Vegan World billboards that started to spring up in the UK in 2016.

And in 2011, I found another vegan PETA billboard that was placed in the US city of Sacramento, featuring the image of a person about to put a pork chop into the microwave next to a picture of a loving mother pig. It reads “Everybody’s Somebody’s Baby. Go Vegan.”

But the earliest I could find wasn’t from Go Vegan World or PETA, but from the Canadian group Niagara Animal Advocacy Group (NAfA) in 2010. The ads were displayed from July to October on billboards in St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, and Welland. They feature a kitten and a chicken in one case, or a puppy and a piglet, with the question “Why love one but eat the other?” and the tagline “Choose compassion – go vegan.” Ontario’s transit commission had not allowed the message to be displayed on its buses with other advertising, even though the group was prepared to pay for space on the city’s buses, so they chose billboards instead.

PETA had been using billboards before that, but the ones I found were on specific animal rights issues or asking people to go vegetarian rather than vegan. But considering that billboards as a method of advertising preceded social media, the chances are that, somewhere, there must have been a far earlier vegan billboard which has not left a digital footprint. It doesn’t matter. The fact is that now they are widely used. Those who started using them still do, and many others have joined them.

The UK’s vegan organisation Viva! has also been using them quite often. In 2018 they launched a giant vegan billboard in Shepherd Bush, west London, that it was reported would be seen by seven million people. They had used the same billboard in Birmingham too.

The history of vegan billboards can be summarised with this sentence: It may have begun at the end of the 20th century, but it gained momentum in the early 2010s and reached its peak from 2016 onwards.

Somehow the year 2016 was a big year for vegan billboards. It’s not only the year that the UK had all the billboards I mentioned but the Canadian group Animal Justice launched a billboard campaign with 70 billboards across the country. Also, that year BeFair- BeVegan released a series of vegan ads throughout New York City, including a moving billboard in the middle of Times Square. Since its launch in 2016, the campaign has gone live in Tasmania, Connecticut, Cleveland, and Melbourne (Australia).

Vegan billboarding is still going strong, and more organisations are using this tactic. Go Vegan World is still spreading them all over (theirs are the vegan billboards I personally have seen more often), and PETA is promoting this tactic so it becomes more common (it even has a webpage encouraging people to use for their own local campaigns the many billboards they designed). In April 2021, the first-ever billboard by The Vegan Society was unveiled on Holywell Lane in Shoreditch, London. It was a mosaic of a dog and their carer made up of thousands of images of rehomed and rescued farmed sanctuary animals.

Do billboards work?

Billboards are not cheap, so they better work. In the UK, billboard rental costs vary according to the size and location, with the cost for a standard printed billboard on an average location being between £200 and £600 for 2 weeks (a typical large billboard of 96 sheets may cost from £1,000 to £5,000). And this does not include the design and printing.

I don’t think there is any research that has specifically looked at whether vegan billboards are effective in making people vegan, but one thing is clear: billboards have existed for a long time, and they have been used by many companies. This means that, at the very least, they work to get the attention of people, and to share awareness of a product, brand, or event. If their product is “veganism”, they should work for spreading awareness too.

Professional advertisers do think that billboards work. According to research by Back40 Design, billboard advertising remains one of the many effective advertising tools available to modern businesses. At least 70% of Americans look at roadside billboards often, and most Americans report learning of an interesting event, business, product, or service from billboards.

A 2009 study conducted by Nielsen Audio found that with billboards, 58% of respondents learnt about an event they were interested in attending, 58% learnt about a restaurant they later visited, 33% were reminded to tune into a TV program, 44% were reminded to tune into a radio station, 26% noted a phone number, and 28% noted a web address. But that was at a time when most people still did not have smartphones, so they were not looking more at them than at the street — as may be the case today.

And here are some statistics produced by topmediadvertising.co.uk:

Billboard advertising costs 80% less than television

With an average CPM of $5.22 (Cost per thousand, the cost an advertiser pays per one thousand advertisement

impressions on a web page), billboards are, in many cases, less cost-prohibitive than online ads whose prices continue to grow.

71% of Consumers Often Look at the Messages on Roadside Billboards

Nearly 26% of consumers visited a store as a result of seeing an OOH (out-ofhome advertising) ad

Billboards make up 66% of the OOH advertising market

Over 7,800 digital billboards are currently active in the US

In the US, there are around 370k active billboards and about 15k new ones added each year

The average cost per billboard in the UK is £200- 500 for two weeks

Billboard advertising only makes up about 7% of the total ad budget

Clear Channel UK, the second-largest provider of OOH advertising, has around 4000 billboards across the UK

By 2021, billboards are expected to grow to a $33B industry

Four of the 10 biggest billboard spenders are tech companies (Apple, Google, Amazon, and Netflix)

98% of people see an OOH ad each week

Those who sell billboard space to campaigners will probably exaggerate their impact because, after all, they want the money those campaigners are prepared to pay. But the campaigners that end up paying for them may also overestimate their impact to justify their expenditure. Faunalytics has done some research about this. They found that there is some disparity in the perception of paid advertising effectiveness between advertisers and consumers. Advertisers are more likely than consumers to believe that ads make people stop and think, and give new information. For instance, 21% of advertisers say that ads that reinforce a message are effective compared with 10% of consumers who say the same thing; they also found that 39% of advertisers are using empathy (with consumers), but only 24% of consumers say that empathy works well or very well. Perhaps the billboards’ function is not to make people vegan, but to make people talk about veganism. If that is the case, there is evidence out there that they do that. On many occasions, vegan billboards have sparked controversy and made it to the papers. For instance, in 2019, several billboards went up across the Maritimes in Canada showing a small calf and the text “Dairy industry took his mom, his milk, then his life.” They were part of the Dairy is Scary campaign run by Vegan Education in Halifax. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency considered stopping them after a single complaint about alleged breaches of Food And Drug Regulations, but they admitted they could not as it was a matter of free speech.

In a landmark decision, the ASA ruled in favour of the Go Vegan World campaign, finding that the ad is not misleading. This independent, official finding that our ad is objectively substantiated with supporting evidence was hugely significant for the campaign and for animal rights.”

- Sandra Higgins, founder of Go Vegan World & Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary

But the attempt made it to the papers, which probably made more people see the ad than the billboard itself.

When the BeFairBeVegan billboard was launched in Melbourne in 2016, it appeared on national TV after they were refused by the government-owned Yarra Trams, sparking a debate around the subject of censorship. In 2020, the Irish Farmers Association sent a news release to the Irish media attempting to malign Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary because of the Go Vegan World campaign and its billboards, which of course made it to the press too. A year earlier the London Bus Operators censored the Go Vegan World New Year ad campaign on 100 buses, which also sparked publicity. And then, if a billboard gets vandalised, there is more opportunity for publicity (as happened with another Go Vegan World billboard in Northern Ireland in 2017).

Billboard campaigns also give the chance to validate some of the facts mentioned in them if an official investigation is made after a complaint and they are proven correct. For instance, in 2019, the UK Advertising Standards Authority rejected complaints about a vegan billboard advert made against Viva!’s TRASH billboard ad after members of the public challenged the claim that 95,000 male calves are shot each year by the dairy industry.

What vegan billboarders think

The people who may know more about how worthwhile vegan billboard campaigns are, are the ones who use them and invest time and resources in them. So, I thought I better ask them directly.

I started with Niagara Action for Animals, as they seem to be one of the pioneers of this tactic. Its co-founder, Cath Ens-Hurwood, sent me the following:

Billboards. Yes. We’ve done them off and on for a number of years, almost exclusively in the Niagara area (Niagara Falls, St. Catharines & Welland, & Fonthill, Ontario). Billboards are very public and the pricing is reasonable for the number of people that will see them. By comparison, if we ran a full page in a local paper for one day, the cost would be approximately the same as a 4-week billboard. I also think that things like this normalize the issue; in the most recent case, veganism. People see it; it is in their faces but in a non-confrontational way. I believe, it makes the curious look further into it or think about it again the next time they hear the word vegan or things associated with it. I also notice a change in ‘activism’. It used to be relatively easy to get people to commit to come out to public events or demos ... for many reasons that has become more difficult. We still do those things, but billboards can help advertise an issue without a lot of organizing, and they remain in public view for as long as one can afford the price. We do get emails and notes about the billboards — all positive — but those are coming from people who are sympathetic and it’s difficult for us to ascertain how ‘successful’ the billboards are — I see them as a cog in a big wheel of activism!

We’ve done billboards on chained dogs, the seal hunt, factory farming, veganism, fur, spay/neuter, circus, ‘why love one & eat the other’, the rodeo and most recently another on veganism... and possibly some that I can’t recall. We’ve also liaised with another group and shared costs with their boards to stop hunting at Shorthills provincial park; the park is also in Niagara. We normally go for the 4-week contract, but this time for the vegan ad, we have hired a board for four spells of four weeks at various times this year, for a total of 16 weeks. The theme will remain the same ... but we will use pictures of different animals — in addition to the calf, we will use a chick and a baby pig.

We also did one regarding chickens and egg-laying. This one was quite controversial — certainly not for us, but for the Ontario Egg Farmers who complained and threatened the billboard company with legal action. This board was a parody of an infamous Egg Farming ad. In any case, the billboard people backed down and it stayed up for only one of the four weeks contracted. However, we were given a credit towards another billboard. As luck would have it, we used the credit to do a board on a local animal-themed amusement park ‘Marineland’ who also threatened us & the billboard company with legal action — but this time, the billboard company stuck to their guns and would not take the board down. My thinking was, firstly, the billboard company didn’t have as much to fear from a local one-off company as they did from the Ontario Egg Farmers and I suppose they may have thought things like taking billboards down was not really very good for their business.

Sandra Higgins from Go Vegan World sent me this:

Go Vegan World campaign is unique because it is inspired and informed by the rescued farmed animals who live at its vegan sanctuary, Eden Farmed Animal Sanctuary. It is animal focused and aims to illustrate the sentience of other animals and challenge the speciesist notion that they are ours to use. Its ads are very simple and easily understood by everyone from children to adults. It uses photos, illustrations and videos, mostly of the animals at Eden, bringing them right from the dark heart of the animal agricultural, research, clothing, and entertainment industries, into the streets, where they confront us with who they are and the injustice of our use of them. It returns their voices to them, giving them the opportunity, as capable, sentient persons, to look at the viewer and ask for what they need from us: for us to stop regarding them as objects and resources, and for us to be vegan.

The campaign has faced many challenges since its inception, including constant attempts by the animal exploiting industries to silence it. In 2017 complaints about a Go Vegan World ad by the dairy industry in the UK, led to an investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). In a landmark decision, the ASA ruled in favour of the Go Vegan World campaign, finding that the ad is not misleading. This independent, official finding that our ad is objectively substantiated with supporting evidence was hugely significant for the campaign and for animal rights. News of the finding was covered in 96 media outlets worldwide, and was on the front page of The Times in the UK.

In 2018, the campaign was challenged on its anti-vivisection ad stating that animal research constitutes torture. The ad was investigated by the ASA who ruled in our favour finding that there was sufficient evidence for us to use the word torture.

It is difficult to precisely measure the success of a campaign such as Go Vegan World with any scientific rigour and this is not something Go Vegan World attempts to do. However, the amount of media attention the campaign has garnered, resulting in the discussion of speciesism, animal rights and veganism in newspapers, and on radio and television, demonstrates its effectiveness. There was an 800% increase in media coverage of animal rights and veganism in Ireland following the launch of the Go Vegan World campaign.

PETA UK’s Director Elisa Allen sent me this:

What reaches one person may not reach another, so at PETA, we try everything. We show people video footage from undercover investigations, hold protests, meet with policy-makers,

hand out leaflets, send letters, and publish commentaries in newspapers, among other actions — and we also place eye-catching, life-changing outdoor ads. The world is saturated with advertisements from industries and corporations promoting products that hurt animals and the environment, so it’s important that we counteract that by spreading the message that animals are not steaks, shoes, or laboratory testing equipment. A well-placed billboard can reach hundreds of thousands of people a day – and that doesn’t include all those who see our ads on social media, where they are often widely shared. Our vegan ads are designed to encourage people to question the status quo. They trigger discussion and debate, all with the goal of prompting people to change a cruel, if unconscious, habit or take compassionate action to help animals.

Many people have contacted us over the years to say that they had a ‘lightbulb’ moment after seeing a PETA ad in the right place at the right time. After taking over Clapham tube station, we saw an increase in the number of people visiting our website to order copies of our vegan starter kit. We also know that people pay attention to our artwork, as journalists regularly write about the ad campaigns in local and national media outlets — enabling the message to spread further.

Camille Labchuk, the Executive Director of the Canadian organisation Animal Justice, sent me this:

We ran our billboard campaign in January/February 2016. There were 70 billboards in three cities— Toronto, Vancouver, and Victoria. The billboards got 1.9 million views per day. Animal Justice ran Canada’s largest-ever animal rights billboard campaign in 2016, focusing on animals used for food, fashion, experiments, and entertainment. We contrasted the heartbreaking suffering that animals endure when used by us, with the relatively trivial benefit to humans — a bite of bacon, a fashion item, mascara, or a moment of entertainment. Millions of Canadians were confronted with how their choices affect animals, and we had tens of thousands of visits to our website from people who were inspired to learn more.

And Juliet Gellatley from Viva! told me this in an interview:

All print advertising, whether it’s print in a national newspaper, print in a national magazine, or print as a billboard, all of it is incredibly expensive. So, you have to test the water with things like that. We don’t actually keep doing billboards because they’re just so expensive. We only go in with them when we think we have just got the right image, and the right message.

It might not relate to a campaign that we are running. It may be that the billboard is a standalone pro-vegan message in its own right.

For example, last spring we did ‘save a baby’ and the reason that we did that is because we tested a video through YouTube — we’re paying for advertising through YouTube, which is considerably cheaper than using a billboard — with different messages and see what’s having the biggest impact, and which people relate to what feedback we get.

And this whole thing of saving a baby had a resonance with meat-eaters. So, we decided to do it as a billboard.

Sometimes — and it depends on the message — we choose a region, as we’re not big enough as an organization to blitz the whole of the UK. What we tend to do is different tactics. For this one, we decided to choose the northwest, so we had a decent amount of billboards across the northwest, choosing very big sites that you can’t avoid in places like Manchester and Liverpool. Then we’d go and do a photocall with the media — it was in Manchester in this case. I did that myself and we talk about the message. Then we do social media around the message and get people talking about what we’re actually saying.

The ad says ‘some people actually eat them but you don’t have to. Save-a-baby.com’.

The main one we used for the billboard was a lamb, but we actually used piglets and chicks in the video. And the other reason we did this is because lambs are often not used in campaigns because you don’t get the footage that you get for other animals — like pigs, chickens, turkeys, and ducks. We wanted to create the empathy that most people relate to animals like lambs because they are seeing them out there. And if it’s one of the few animals they see out there in the fields, you know it’s making that connection.

If you have a strong enough message that’s completely non-gory, this is what we’ve found for us works with billboards. There’s no accusation. It’s opening a conversation with the person reading that. It’s not judgmental. It’s saying ‘you’ve probably never thought about this but you really don’t need to do this.’ And then we measure how many people go to the website.

There can be other reasons. We did another billboard I particularly like that got the most response local media-wise — because really you’re only looking at local media. It was ‘when did you last kill an animal?’ It’s a beautiful pale pink background with a picture of a calf, piglet, and lamb. So, there’s nothing gory. And then the website is just to choose vegan. So, very plain and simple. What that one is saying is more challenging. It was interesting. Before we even put that billboard up, we did research with the public, vegans, and a sixth form school.

We did a very simple survey and the vegans said ‘you can’t use that it’s too challenging,’ but the meat-eaters said ‘that’s the only one that impacts on me. I didn’t even think about the other things, they’re just not strong enough.’ And it just goes to show that sometimes you should not listen to a vegan audience, as they’ve all got pre-formed ideas of what influences a meat-eater.

Are billboards impactful?

Billboards have some inbuilt disadvantages that should be taken into consideration when thinking about using them. They are not cheap, they are temporary, they don’t allow audience segmentation, they provide limited information, they only work if they are in places where people see them, and they do not allow the audience to directly ask questions about the issue shown (as the classic street vegan outreach would).

On the other hand, they can draw a lot of attention (both in the street and in the media), they are useful to link them to events (i.e., their unveiling), they may spark a controversy that could lead to more exposure, once they are up they do not require additional admin, they do not need large groups of people to produce them, they are likely to be seen by people that don’t want to see them (so, they are good to reach beyond the usual audience), they can be very original and memorable, they can enhance the ”brand” of a vegan organisation, they “normalise” veganism by putting it “on the high street”, they can be more “to the point”, and they are a good counter-tactic to carnist billboards that dominate the streets.

This means that, if an organisation is lucky and has the right skills and resources, it can maximise the pros and minimise the cons. If they have very talented graphic designers and find cheaper deals for hiring billboard space, billboarding can be a cost-effective tactic for them, especially if it is just a component of a wider campaign using several platforms. But not only that. Billboards can put an organisation or group on the map, making them stand from the crowd and getting their “brand” circulating beyond the locality where the board is placed — I bet that many of you had not heard before about Niagara Action for Animals, but now because of their billboards, you have. And, like with Go Vegan World, billboarding may almost become a brand identity, which expands the remit of the organisation (once a successful billboard is produced, it is relatively simple to replicate in other places or even other countries). And as they happen in particular locations, they can be used as spots that work as “centres of focus” that can have a galvanizing effect on local grassroots movements.

They can backfire, though. If they happen to “cross the line” or become too insensitive to particular communities — I am thinking of an early PETA “Save The Whales” billboard campaign — they could risk ruining an organisation’s reputation and can set the movement back if they show misinformation confirmed by the authorities after complaints are issued. And, if the billboard targets a particular individual or company, you may be exposed to legal action. So, they must be properly thought about and they should be taken seriously because they can become a double-edged sword.

For established vegans like myself, I’d rather see vegan billboards on the street than have to see all the other carnist billboards that are polluting my everyday landscape every time I move away from any of my vegan cocoons — this may seem a selfish reason to have them, but it is a reason nonetheless.

As for how impactful they are on the population in terms of making people vegan, we will never know for sure. But that is the fate of any vegan outreach tactic too, always surrounded by a cloud of uncertainty. So, if one thinks that doing vegan outreach is a good strategy for animal liberation and building a vegan world, there is no reason to discard the billboard tactic only based on the difficulty to assess its impact. Who knows how many people have become vegan because, among the dozens — or hundreds — of places they were exposed to vegan messaging, one of them was a vegan billboard.

But one thing seems clear to me. I don’t think anyone decided not to become a vegan just because a vegan billboard was erected for a few weeks somewhere in a street this person may occasionally pass through. I don’t think vegan billboards make carnists out of vegans or veganphobes. In fact, other more aggressive types of activism, or more confrontational types of outreach, are more likely to have this backfiring effect than a billboard — which is unlikely to be taken “personally” by anyone.

In this regard, I would say that, whatever impact vegan billboards have, it’s likely to be a welcome addition to the efforts of the vegan movement to create a vegan world.

That’s good enough for me.

By Jordi CasamitjanaAuthor of ‘Ethical Vegan’ >