Create a 60-second Public Service Announcement in conjunction with the 2020 Super Bowl that would introduce PETA’s Anti-Speciesism Campaign to a global audience. Speciesism, like sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination, is a human supremacist viewpoint that allows humans to treat animals of other species like objects, even though they share our capacity for pain, hunger, fear, thirst, love, joy, and loneliness and have as much interest in freedom and staying alive as humans do. Speciesism is at the core of all the most widespread forms of animal abuse.
The ad is in solidarity with all movements against social injustice, and also pays homage to Colin Kaepernick, who, in 2016, when he played football for the San Francisco 49ers, famously “took a knee” in protest against police brutality, racial inequality, and systematic abuse in general. PETA has long admired Mr. Kaepernick, whose simple, elegant, non-violent form of protest resonated globally, and in turn, inspired PETA to call on people everywhere to expand their concept of injustice to include injustice against all species.
Target audience: Super Bowl Viewers, Football fans in general
Approach: The plan was to run the ad during the Super Bowl or in the pre-game broadcast leading up to it, either nationally on FOX or in local markets on Fox Affiliates.
The ad envisions a moment where all animals, including humans, stand, or in this case, “take a knee,” in cross-species solidarity, knowing that our differences are far outweighed by our similarities, that we share the same capacity to feel pain, fear, love and joy, and that we all have intrinsic value based on our unique individuality, not on what species we happen to be.
Using evocative hand drawn animation set to the U.S. National Anthem being “hummed” by collective animal voices, we see a bee land on a flower, kneel, and lower her head. We recognize the iconic pose.
From an overhead POV, a wide array of animals of all species do the same. The source of our overhead POV is revealed: a majestic Bald Eagle who gracefully lands and kneels. The National Anthem concludes with the text:
Respect is the Right of Every Living Being
#EndSpeciesism
PETA
TMZ agreed to launch the ad 3 days prior to the Super Bowl.
The ad got more than 4 million video views across PETA's social channels, and the feature hit over 35,000 page views. The majority of views came from Twitter (3.7m), where PETA was a trending topic and featured in Twitter moments, reaching as high as the #13 trend in the US the day it launched. After the exclusive broke with TMZ, the ad proceeded to get coverage in nearly 70 outlets around the world. Top U.S. press included USA Today, WSJ, Yahoo!, and Reuters. PETA Latino also pitched the campaign, which got us mentions in popular Spanish-language publications, including El Universal and La Opinión. We also saw on Google Trends that the ad prompted a spike in people searching the term "speciesism." We were also fortunate enough to get Kaepernick's "blessing" of the spot ahead of the ad launch.
Instagram:135,898 reach, 149,491 impressions, 45,121 views, 9,987 likes, and 815 comments
Facebook: 279,973 reach, 143,917 views, 7,420 engagements, 7,420 reactions, comments, and shares
Twitter: 4,535,696 impressions, 1,488,762 engagements, 2,942,619 views, 28.9k likes and 10.1k retweets
