The campaign by Edelman ‘BAN THIS PROFILE’ won Gold in Social Use of Data and Platforms at The Drum Awards. It aimed to reduce social media’s role in driving demand for wild animals as pets in Brazil, using Instagram profiles to train algorithms to suppress harmful content.
Brazil has one of the largest and most diverse biological ecosystems on the planet, home to 13% of the world’s largest animal and plant life. It also possesses one of the most active and dangerous illegal wildlife trade markets, with snakes, fish, primates, songbirds, frogs, and parrots among the many species that are routinely exploited.*Source
Despite extensive efforts to advocate for animal rights, wild animal trafficking in Brazil has been growing exponentially, reaching an alarming 35 million individuals annually. The problem has been compounded by a combination of factors, including a lack of quality data, data sharing, and enforcement coordination between state and federal authorities. It’s an issue that is core to the mission of Ampara Silvestre, the largest and most important animal protection and defense organization in Brazil, recognized by the Brazilian Ministry of Justice as an OSCIP (Civil Society Organization of Public Interest). Its goal is to change society by taking action to support, educate, and raise awareness about animal rights. And given the recent increase in trafficking, the challenge for our organization has never been clearer or more urgent.
Ampara Silvestre asked us to create a campaign that would reduce the influence of social media in driving demand for wild animals as pets. The goal was not just to raise awareness, but to directly challenge the normalization of this type of content online. We needed to expose how seemingly harmless posts such as monkeys in clothes or snakes in living rooms create desire and ultimately drive trafficking. The campaign had to be digital, scalable, and behavior driven. Instead of confronting traffickers, we focused on the audience unknowingly supporting them and used the platform's own logic to suppress harmful content.
In Brazil, 30+ million wild animals are trafficked every year. Social media plays a growing role in fueling this illegal market. Our strategy was built on a clear behavioral and cultural insight: cute, humanized wildlife content on Instagram does not just entertain, it creates desire. And desire drives demand.
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Research revealed that 37 percent of monkey purchase searches and 18 percent of snake purchase searches are directly influenced by Instagram content. Yet most of these posts are technically legal and widely accepted.
We understood that a traditional awareness campaign would not be enough. We needed to work inside the system, using the same dynamics that spread this content to suppress it.
The strategy focused on digitally native audiences, especially Gen Z and Millennials, who shape what becomes popular online. By understanding how they interact—and how algorithms respond—we turned insight into a creative action that challenged the problem at its core.
Wild animals dressed, accessorized, and treated like pets are going viral on social media, fueling the exotic pet trade in Brazil. While most of this content is legal, it causes real harm. Instead of using traditional awareness tactics, we made the platform work against itself.
'BAN THIS PROFILE', a campaign designed to be banned—to help save wild animals from trafficking.
We created 150 Instagram profiles featuring over 1,500 AI-generated posts that mirrored popular wildlife pet content. Then, using our own social media channels and a group of influencer allies, we encouraged people to report the profiles, turning passive engagement into meaningful action. Each report trained the algorithm to suppress similar content. Our profiles were removed first. Then real ones followed, even those considered legal.
A campaign that was not made to go viral, but to disappear. An intervention that turned the platform’s own rules into a tool for change.
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We conducted deep research to identify the most common visual patterns, aesthetics, and behaviors in popular wildlife pet content on social media. We used artificial intelligence to simulate over 1,500 posts, recreating the exact type of content that fuels demand.
These images were published across 150 newly created Instagram profiles, each built to be reported by users. The more reports, the more the algorithm would learn to deprioritize similar content.
We launched the campaign through our own social channels and activated a squad of influencers aligned with animal protection causes. They helped amplify the profiles and encouraged their communities to take part.
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Instagram was chosen as the core platform for its central role in spreading this content and its relevance to the target audience, primarily Gen Z and Millennials. The campaign scaled rapidly, adapting in real time as the algorithm responded, reducing visibility even for real and legal content.
The campaign targeted video content across TikTok and Instagram in both English and Portuguese, focusing on mentions of endangered animals like parrots, monkeys, and snakes. Using tubular, a social video intelligence platform, data was gathered from 10-16 April 2025, with comparisons made to the previous 7 days (2-9 April 2024).
* 2024 vs 2025
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