Amazon whale meat campaign: going behind the scenes
What a difference a day makes.
On Tuesday morning, we released our report Amazon.com’s Unpalatable Profits and launched our campaign to urge internet giant Amazon to remove all whale products from its wholly owned subsidiary Amazon Japan.
To say the response was overwhelming is to put it mildly. Tens of thousands of people around the world took action via Twitter, Facebook, an online petition and sending protest emails to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
By the end of the day, Amazon had quietly removed all whale products from Amazon Japan.
A key aspect of EIA’s campaign was the attention-grabbing 50-second campaign film we distributed to help raise awareness of the issue and spur action.
The film was viewed thousands of times and shared widely around the internet via Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news sites.
EIA Visuals Specialist Paul Redman directed and edited the campaign film, and has prepared a special video blog in which Senior Campaigner Clare Perry and Press Officer Paul Newman talk about the creation of the film, the Amazon campaign, and where it goes next.
We can only offer our sincere and heartfelt thanks to the many thousands of you who took action to let Amazon know that cashing in on the slaughter of whales is totally unacceptable for a global business in the 21st century.
But the campaign isn’t over yet, and won’t be until we have a formal commitment from Amazon that it will enact a company-wide, permanent ban on all whale, dolphin and porpoise products.
And let’s hope that other internet retailers selling products from endangered and threatened species around the world are taking note.