Award-winning campaign

Client: BPEX

Agency: Good Relations

In 2007, a poor wheat harvest sent pig feed prices soaring. Farmers started losing up to £20 per animal; farms started closing. BPEX, which represents Britain's pig industry, turned to Good Relations. Could supermarkets be persuaded to increase the price they paid farmers for pork, if consumers realized how bad things were?

Good Relations' prize-winning campaign - Pigs Are Worth It - ran for more than a year. Singing farmers launched a single, 'Stand By Your Ham'. Two hundred of them descended on Westminster, and a three-part documentary, An Inconvenient Trough, was launched at the House Of Lords. Jamie Oliver was moved to make Jamie Saves Our Bacon on Channel 4, which talked about why pig farmers were suffering, British pork's unrivalled quality and why both were worth saving.

Media interest was enormous: national and regional television coverage, magazine features, national and local newspaper articles, together created 400 million opportunities to see. The price farmers got for pork from supermarkets increased, and stayed that way.

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