Executive Summary

Reducing meat consumption is critical for the sake of the planet, public health and animal suffering. Social media advertising provides an excellent opportunity to facilitate this by encouraging consumers to make dietary changes.

This study ran advertisements on social media in four UK areas to sway shoppers away from pork and collected supermarket retail data to assess how consumption changed during and after advertising. Retail data from areas where advertisements were shown were compared to the rest of the UK and to politically matched areas.

Our analysis showed that:

1. Fresh pork sales dropped significantly after the advertising campaign in target areas compared to the rest of the UK, falling by an estimated 1.3% (p < .001).

2. However, sales of all fresh meat (including pork) were approximately 2.3% higher (p < .001) where advertising occurred compared to the UK as a whole.

3. That said, this effect was reversed when advertisement regions were matched against politically similar control areas, showing decreases in both pork and overall meat consumption for both left-wing and right-wing areas exposed to the advertisements.

4. Secondary analyses indicated that a “Make the switch to plant-based” tagline (“pull” framing) was more impactful than a “Leave pork off your plate” tagline (“push” framing) in the advertisements.

These findings provide behavioural evidence that social media advertising can successfully influence supermarket meat sales.