We’re really proud to have recently unveiled our first ever billboard for the Future Normal campaign, sporting the strapline ‘Love all animals’!
The response so far has been fantastic with excellent coverage in the vegan media and lots of love for our posts online. We wanted to take the opportunity to explain our thinking behind the image, and the message behind it to provide some clarity and context.
The main image features a dog and their carer, a young girl, but is actually made up of thousands of smaller images of formerly farmed animals now living peacefully in sanctuaries. Check out the ‘zoom-in’ video below for a closer look.
The billboard is huge at 47 by 23 foot (14.45m x 6.9m) and the location is such that whether walking or driving past, viewers will be close enough to make out the smaller images in the mosaic as well as the main large image of girl and dog. It is at street-level so passers-by will be close enough to touch and even scan the QR code, taking them to the Future Normal website.
A dog was deliberately chosen for the main image, as dogs are currently the most popular companion animal in the UK, and an animal that most non-vegans already understand as deserving love.
Most non-vegans have not yet made the connection that typically farmed animals like cows, pigs, and chickens, also feel pain and deserve consideration of their interests. This is why we went for the mosaic concept, as it allows us to construct the main image that most people can relate to, with thousands of other images of animals who are often not considered.
Underneath the strapline, ‘Love all animals’, comes a reflective question, ‘Whichever way you look at it, don’t all animals deserve love?’ This clever play on the mosaic format helps to get the message across that some animals, like dogs, are very visible to us, whilst many more, like farmed animals, remain invisible. These animals need us all to take a moment to stop and think about why we believe there is a difference.
The Future Normal campaign is built on this reflective nature and purposefully shies away from some of the more confrontational forms of advocacy. We are committed to being positive, non-judgemental and to igniting the spark at the start of people’s vegan journey. There are many other vegan campaigns which excel at the more direct forms of advocacy, so we didn’t want to replicate their approach but rather operate in a different space and reach people who will respond to a softer, more reflective approach.
We’ve had some excellent feedback from people who have seen the billboard and have noted a marked increase in Future Normal website traffic as a result, so it is clear that this approach is working. We believe that this is one of the many steps needed to get to a kinder future for all animals!
The views expressed by our bloggers are not necessarily the views of The Vegan Society.
