Publicity push increases seafood certification’s exposure

Editor/ Mohamed Shihab

Media mentions for Best Aquaculture Practices programme up by 160%

The Global Seafood Alliance (GSA) has announced the preliminary results from its first United States consumer marketing campaign, “Healthy Fish, Healthy Planet, Healthy You!”

Conducted in October to coincide with the US National Seafood Month, the campaign was designed to build consumer awareness of its Best Aquaculture Practices (BAP) certification programme and drive sales of BAP-certified seafood products.

The target audience for the campaign was Millennials in the United States, which research showed was the best audience for seafood from BAP-certified producers.

Campaign tactics included an “Are You AquaCultured?” social media campaign, targeted influencer engagement, the creation of new consumer messaging and a consumer website, and national and regional consumer media outreach.

Eight partners

The GSA said the public relations efforts resulted in a significant increase in media mentions for BAP, with top stories including a live interview on Good Day Seattle, multiple TV broadcast segments with dietitian Mia Syn, and articles in The Washington Post and Food Tank, among others.

Eight retail and foodservice partners signed on for GSA’s consumer campaign. These included store chains Giant Eagle, Hannaford, Lidl, Publix, and WinCo Foods. Secret Island Salmon, the direct-to-consumer brand of Chilean salmon farmer Salmones Austral, and Iberostar Hotels also partnered GSA.

The partners participated by creating their own content about BAP, posting and sharing BAP content on social media, promoting BAP in stores and on their websites, and working with campaign influencers.

Are You AquaCultured?

The influencers created recipes and posted them on Instagram using BAP seafood purchased from campaign partners. The “Are You AquaCultured?” social media campaign saw enhanced consumer engagement with many of the top posts including approachable seafood recipes.

Using these tactics, GSA saw a 160% increase in media mentions for BAP in 2022 compared to the same time period in 2021. The media mentions had a total reach of 7.3 billion, and the social media campaign had a reach of 1 million, with more than 170,000 engagements. The social media influencer posts alone had nearly 340,000 impressions.Media coverage for BAP was much higher during and around the period that the campaign was running than in the same period last year.