According to our best evidence, the current top intervention to reduce animal suffering is online veg ads. As discussed in a recent blog post, it is crucial to to make these ads as effective as possible. EAA’s top charities both use the Farm to Fridge video, after trial-and-error refinement supported its effectiveness compared to other existing videos, further confirmed by Faunalytics’ recent study.
Joining in on online veg ads is the new ‘What Came Before’ video: http://www.whatcamebefore.com/ – a page recently put up by Farm Sanctuary.
While this video shares many of the upsides of Farm to Fridge, especially in its powerful undercover footage of factory farms, it also uniquely employs a number of techniques highlighted in the (highly recommended) book Change of Heart: What Psychology Can Teach Us About Spreading Social Change by The Humane League.
For this reason, in the near future EAA will look to collect data on how effective this new video is in comparison to other existing videos, and we’ll publish the results here.
So in the meantime, as animal activists:
1. Take a guess and tell us what you believe the results will be: more effective or less effective than Farm to Fridge?
2. Share the new page – http://www.whatcamebefore.com – on social media, to help increase traffic, which will help increase the potential data set for surveying its effectiveness.
Wildlife Conservation’s Relationship to Wild Animal Welfare
Farmed Animals: How Factory Farming Affects Different Species
Prioritizing Between Farmed and Wild-Caught Fishes
Thanks for sharing, Eitan! This looks like a strong video. I like that it uses story, cites animal intelligence, and mentions individal impact rather than large, impersonal statistics. All these things have been shown to compel meat reduction or at least drive behavioral change in general.
I’d like to see rigorous testing not just between different videos but between slight variants of the same video. For instance, in “What Came Before,” would it be more effective to show all the cruelty and then make the empathy appeal? Or are there a couple images early on in the video that are so graphic that they turn off viewers who would otherwise keep watching? Would different music in the background be more effective?
Now that so many people are viewing these videos online and have clear call to actions (ordering a veg start kit or liking the video on Facebook) it’s easier than ever before to measure the efficacy of slight variants. I’d recommend using a tool like Optimizely or Google Content Experiments where you can present multiple versions of the same web page (in this case with slightly different videos) and measure how site visitors behave in each case.
Anyway, I’m really excited to see how this video plays out, I have a good feeling about it!
I like the way the video made victims identifiable – we know this this an effective tactic, and it seems underused in the animal rights movement. I personally guess that it will be more effective than F2F, for what that’s worth.
It’s also interesting that it includes fish – curious to see how that plays out.
I think it’s great! Unfortunately one of the song does remind me of this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JByREL-F_VI) but other than that I think it’s really good!