Anti-factory farming ads are plastering the tube. We found out who’s paying for them

They’re almost impossible to miss. Pasted all over the transport network, between adverts for Jack Daniels and TfL notices about using headphones, you can see huge images of pigs surrounded by gas, hormone-grown chickens with broken legs or the greying flesh of farmed salmon. Next to each is a claim made by the food industry, followed by the line “don’t buy it”. Since the Spring, the adverts have been almost impossible to miss. And at the bottom of each is the same sign-off: the logo of a group called Project Slingshot.

Campaign ads on the Tube are nothing unusual. Commercial messages that fall under the category of government, political or social campaigns are the second-biggest category of promotions across the TfL network after entertainment, making up one eighth of all ads. But the sheer scale of this inescapable drive — and its celebrity backers like musician Paul McCartney, actor Mark Rylance and comedian Diane Morgan — caught my attention, and I wanted to find out more about the group behind it.

“We’re pretty much on every tube car,” laughs Naomi Hallum, the co-chief executive of Project Slingshot. “And in most major stations.” There are roughly 5,000 of the group’s ads dotted around the tube at any one time. Each eight-week campaign is costing around £400,000 each, Hallum tells me.

Which raises a natural question: who is footing the bill for forcing factory farming onto the capital’s agenda? Trying to answer that eventually led me to a movement that’s slowly taking over Silicon Valley.