Stop Big Ag: AI, Innovation, and Abandoning What No Longer Works

The best content in the world doesn't matter if no one sees it. I've spent years thinking about this problem. How advocacy organizations produce compelling work that never reaches the intended audiences. Digital platforms we've relied on are breaking down. Organic reach keeps dropping. Algorithms favor noise over substance. And when your own channels are already packed, even compelling content can get buried. Distribution has become the real challenge in modern campaigning.

Greenpeace launched two major climate and biodiversity campaigns in early 2025 targeting industrial agriculture's climate impact. The Respect The Amazon campaign focused on JBS, the world's largest meat processor, and the billionaire Batista brothers who control it. Joesley and Wesley Batista had built their family's Brazilian slaughterhouse into a global empire that controls a quarter of US beef processing. They'd also confessed to bribing hundreds of politicians and served jail time before returning to power. Over the years, we had amassed irrefutable evidence that JBS's cattle operations were driving deforestation across the Amazon.

The complement to Respect The Amazon was the Stop Big Ag campaign, which focused more on methane emissions from industrial dairy players. Companies like Fonterra in New Zealand and Arla in Europe produce greenhouse gas pollution through cow burps and farts that rivals oil companies, but governments had long ignored agricultural emissions in their climate commitments in international fora like the UNFCCC.

Both campaigns had the same goal: force the environmental impact of industrial agriculture onto the agenda at COP30, the UN climate summit happening in Brazil in November. But COP30's location in Belém meant the Amazon deforestation story would dominate Greenpeace's major channels and resources. That made strategic sense. Burning rainforests are easier to visualize than invisible methane.

My job as the communications and engagement lead was to make the case for Stop Big Ag. The climate impacts of major dairy corporations are being ignored by everyone. The challenge wasn't just making good content. It was finding new ways for audiences to actually see it when our traditional channels were saturated or failing. Luckily, I was involved in an extracurricular project at Greenpeace that summer that gave me some answers.

Tech Camp: Where Innovators Find Answers

TechCamp is a virtual network-wide skillshare where Greenpeace campaigners from over 20 global offices go when they want to think outside the box and learn about the latest technologies from our best practitioners. Every year, staff from across the global network spend weeks preparing presentations and workshops culminating in four days of sharing unconventional ideas and testing new approaches in usually more than 100 webinars. TechCamp is entirely volunteer-led by people experimenting with what works and sharing case studies or interest areas.

I stepped up to co-lead a track to draw people who are less techie than the usual TechCamp crowd. I called it "The Future of Impact Campaigns: AI, Big Trends and More" and designed it specifically for campaigners who don't normally attend TechCamp. With the help of TechCamp organizers and my co-lead, I curated sessions on low-code apps, AI’s impact on search traffic, the environmental impact of AI, and marketing automation. My own presentation covered practical AI tools for deep research, multimodal ideation and visual brainstorming.

The real revelation came from sessions about what's killing these platforms we relied upon. Presenters laid out Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" concept. Platforms start by being good to users. Then they abuse users to make things better for business customers by exploiting their data. Then they abuse those business customers to extract all value for themselves. Then they die.

In my view, Facebook and Instagram were already in late-stage collapse. Meta had long since shifted from showing you posts from friends and pages you follow to algorithmic feeds pushing random content from accounts you've never heard of. The default feed no longer prioritized your connections. It prioritized whatever kept you scrolling. 

Elon Musk's transformation of Twitter into X was even more destructive. He gutted content moderation, reinstated banned accounts, told fleeing advertisers to "go fuck yourself," and watched ad revenue collapse by over 40%. Greenpeace had tried alternatives. We'd experimented with TikTok and tested Bluesky when it opened up. Both produced lackluster results. So we kept pouring our efforts into Instagram because we had large audiences there and nothing else seemed to work.

Worse, these dying platforms were about to get flooded with AI-generated garbage. OpenAI launched Sora 2 at the end of September. Photorealistic video completely made up and huge cost to the environment. Deepfakes became commonplace. Meta launched "Vibes" a few weeks later. Now these platforms were entering a dystopic phase where nobody could tell what was real, like a Mission Impossible plot. The platforms we'd relied on weren't just declining. They were becoming actively hostile to authentic human communication and reality.

I kept thinking about this problem. There had to be one channel that operated differently. Then it occurred to me. LinkedIn. The professional network hadn't been completely overrun yet. Posts from people or colleagues you knew or respected still showed up in your feed. The algorithm prioritized relevant professional content over random, viral garbage. And, thought leaders and decision-makers were actually there trying to maintain respectability. This was a platform yet to "enshittify" and well worth testing.

After TechCamp, I made the case to the Stop Big Ag team in a presentation that we needed to devote some budget to paid campaigns on LinkedIn. It was the only platform that could target people by industry, organizational affiliation, education level, job title. The technology was more sophisticated than anything Meta or X offered. We could get messages directly in front of dairy executives, agricultural policymakers, and people opposed to industrial agriculture. The audience was there. We just needed the right content to test our delivery mechanism.

Caged Animals and Corporate Flatulence

That fall, notable pieces of anchor content were coming together to make our case to decision makers. First was an action planned for the FAO Livestock Conference in Rome, the biggest food policy meeting. The Food and Agriculture Organization is the UN body responsible for global food policy, and their livestock conference brings together government officials, industry representatives, and agricultural researchers. It was the perfect target for exposing how industrial agriculture's methane emissions were being ignored in climate policy.

Greenpeace Italy was leading the planning for Rome. They had solid initial concepts. A livestock art installation in a public square. A pink smoke flash mob performance. A banner drop from the FAO building facade. Good starting points that had visual merit. But we needed something more visceral and media-ready. Something that would photograph well from ground level and work for aerial drone footage. Something that made invisible methane emissions impossible to ignore.

That's when we used the AI brainstorming technique I'd been teaching at Tech Camp and Google's Nano Banana within its Gemini suite. (Greenpeace's AI policy explicitly bans using generative AI on public channels but we do use it to come up with new ideas.) Usually visual brainstorms involve writing concepts on virtual post-its and arguing about what they mean because so few people draw. With Nano Banana, we could be extremely specific about what we wanted to see right down to the costume details of the actual FAO building where we'd stage the action. We landed on activists silently protesting inside cages with pink smoke representing invisible methane.

On September 29, activists executed the concept with surprising accuracy to the AI visualizations. Dozens of people dressed as cows, pigs, and chickens locked inside metal cages outside the FAO building. Pink smoke filled the air representing methane emissions. Signs reading "Farms Not Factories." FAO delegates walking past couldn't ignore it. Press covering the conference came out to photograph it. The action drew attention to what mattered: an open letter signed by over 100 environment, develpment, food, and agriculture groups calling on governments to urgently slash agricultural emissions through a just transition away from industrial agriculture. But we did it in a way that was ethical and communicated to activists exactly what we were going for. Behind the scenes, it got everyone on the same page. If you can visualize accurately, sometimes can make it reality.

Sometimes, you can spoof reality to make your point. Earlier in the year, Greenpeace Denmark's "Revisit Denmark" spoof travel video had been a breakout success with our Nordic audiences. The satirical tourism ad showed pristine Danish countryside while the narrator cheerfully described agricultural pollution destroying waterways and ecosystems. It worked brilliantly for local Danish audiences, generated significant media pickup, and drove petition signatures. 

We wanted to internationalize that success and pitched Studio Birthplace, our production partner from previous campaigns, on adapting the tourism spoof format for global multi-country execution. But they argued that a global tour would prove too expensive so they pitched a different idea. A fake news interview with a dairy spokesperson. It would be cheaper to produce, offer faster turnaround, and could be just as impactful to the audiences we were targeting as humor tends to cut through while making a serious point.  The satirical news format could slide into feeds naturally while subverting expectations.

Studio Birthplace connected us with a London-based comedy writing team to develop "The True Smell of Progress." The concept was a fake news interview featuring Giles LeBoeuf, a bumbling Big Ag industry spokesman, being grilled by Melinda Hartlein, a formidable NewsNight-style host. The script would systematically expose greenwashing from JBS, Fonterra, and Arla by stating their claims earnestly enough that they revealed themselves as absurd.

The comedy writers understood how to make industry talking points collapse under their own weight. Physical comedy would escalate as Giles sweated, choked on milk, and accidentally farted pink methane. We didn't need to argue against the greenwashing. We parodied it.

Beyond the FAO action and news spoof, we had infographics, reports, animations and other content ready to release over a ten-week window leading up to COP30 in Belem in November. But we knew we wouldn't have access to our normal channels. Instagram and Facebook were saturated with Amazon campaign content and other campaigns. Twitter was a wasteland. TikTok and Bluesky hadn't popped. LinkedIn just made more and more sense.

LinkedIn: Strategy From A Different Playbook

Now that we had our content ready for deployment, it was time to test this new delivery system. I worked with Pierce from Studio Birthplace who I had done smaller LinkedIn experiments in the past. We built a robust LinkedIn campaign around two distinct personas with different objectives and landing pages that would receive our flood of content, creating a creative continual narrative that would counterprogram the usual LinkedIn feed.. 

Persona 1 targeted people who don't typically follow Greenpeace and might actively disagree with us. Agriculture policy professionals at NGOs and think tanks. Industry insiders at meat and dairy companies. Government officials working on climate and agricultural policy. We weren't trying to convert them into donors. The goal was challenging their professional assumptions by injecting our narrative directly into their echo chambers. In these cases, we drove them toward a coalition sign-on letter at reimaginefoodsystems.org showing institutional backing from over 100 organizations that agricultural methane must be reduced to reach emissions goals set up in 2015 Paris Agreement.

Persona 2 targeted our core base of climate-concerned activists and sustainable food advocates, but in LinkedIn's professional environment, not Instagram or dying channels. We directed them toward Greenpeace action petitions to keep them engaged with the campaign. We ran seven waves of content from late September through November, timed to critical moments from the FAO Conference through COP30 negotiations. Total reach: 1.9 million impressions, 723,000 video views, nearly 14,000 clicks driving traffic to both the coalition letter and petition pages.

The data told a clear story about what breaks through to professional audiences. Clever video content generated massive views and engagement compared to static reports and infographics, but the real surprise came from which videos worked best with which audiences. Policy professionals and industry insiders engaged more with satirical content than with academic reports and data-heavy presentations. These are people who spend their entire workdays drowning in technical documents and emissions data, so they stopped scrolling for content that made them laugh or caught them off guard. The humor wasn't just entertainment, it was strategic. Satire disarmed their professional skepticism and let our arguments land before their defenses went up, proving that "professional audience" doesn't mean "boring content."

Innovation is Survival

Sometimes the hardest part of campaigning isn't learning new tools but abandoning old ones. The approaches we'd relied on for years had stopped working the way they once did. There's comfort in repeating what you know, but not when the results keep getting worse. Real innovation requires letting go of that comfort and being willing to fail in public while you figure out what works now. Generative AI and LinkedIn aren't magic solutions, they're just tools that match the current moment.

What matters is the willingness to experiment, to measure honestly, and to redirect resources toward what actually performs rather than what feels safe. Every organization faces this moment when their standard playbook stops delivering results. The question isn't whether your channels are dying, it's whether you'll acknowledge it soon enough to build something new. Distribution will always be the challenge. The tactics that solve it will keep changing. But the principle stays the same: meet your audiences where they actually are, wherever they are, not where you wish they were.