Last Prisoner Project's 'Pardon People. Not Poultry.' campaign by Sid Lee uses the presidential turkey pardon to demand cannabis justice for federal prisoners.
Last Prisoner Project Turns Thanksgiving Tradition Against Itself
Last Prisoner Project's "Pardon People. Not Poultry." is a 2024 Thanksgiving public service campaign created by Sid Lee that uses the President's annual turkey pardon ritual to demand federal clemency for Americans still incarcerated on cannabis offenses.
Launched on November 19, 2024, in the United States, the campaign arrives at a moment of acute political urgency. President Biden had campaigned on a promise to use his clemency powers to release federal cannabis prisoners, yet according to lastprisonerproject.org, thousands of Americans remained incarcerated for cannabis offenses as his term neared its close. Last Prisoner Project — a national, nonpartisan nonprofit — partnered with Sid Lee in the agency's first collaboration with the organisation to translate that unresolved promise into public pressure.
The campaign's central mechanism is both simple and pointed. A video juxtaposes images of presidentially pardoned turkeys with individuals still awaiting cannabis justice, framing the contrast as a moral absurdity: birds receiving clemency while human beings remain in federal custody. Viewers are directed to PeopleNotPoultry.com, where they can scroll through the names and stories of real Americans imprisoned on cannabis charges. Selecting any name triggers a pre-drafted letter sent directly to [email protected], collapsing the distance between passive awareness and active civic demand. The campaign ran across online video, web, social media, radio, and donated media placements in Washington, D.C., as reported by LBBOnline. In the United States, the intersection of Thanksgiving symbolism and criminal justice reform gave the campaign a cultural hook that no competing message in that news cycle could replicate.
Last Prisoner Project identified a single, annually recurring moment of presidential symbolic power and turned it into a liability for inaction. The turkey pardon, a tradition traceable to the Civil War era according to lastprisonerproject.org, carries bipartisan warmth and guaranteed media coverage every November — precisely the properties the campaign needed to amplify a social justice message without a paid media budget commensurate with commercial advertisers.
The strategic decision to anchor the campaign to a civic ritual rather than an abstract policy argument reflects a broader trend in nonprofit public interest advertising in the United States. According to mrbenchmarks.com, total nonprofit advertising investment in the U.S. increased by approximately twelve percent in 2024, with digital ad spending among nonprofits rising by roughly eleven percent in that same year according to wholewhale.com. Against that landscape, organisations without deep media budgets must earn attention through cultural relevance rather than paid reach — and donated Washington, D.C., media placements, as noted by Little Black Book, extended the campaign's footprint into the precise geography where its audience of decision-makers resides.
Within the cannabis justice space in the United States, Last Prisoner Project competes for public attention and donor support with organisations including the Drug Policy Alliance and the ACLU, both of which have sustained federal advocacy programs. Where those organisations often lead with legal and legislative framing, Last Prisoner Project and Sid Lee chose emotional specificity: named individuals, personal stories, and a direct digital action pathway. That choice distinguishes the campaign's architecture from the broader policy advocacy playbook and positions PeopleNotPoultry.com as the single clearest conversion point in the cannabis clemency conversation during the 2024 Thanksgiving window.
The creative team at Sid Lee built the campaign around contrast as its primary rhetorical device. The juxtaposition of ceremonial turkey pardons — covered annually with levity by national press — against the faces and names of incarcerated Americans generates its argument through image sequencing rather than polemic, a discipline that demands restraint from its makers and earns attention from audiences fatigued by cause-marketing decibel levels.
Ali Stewart served as Chief Creative Officer and EVP Creative North America, with Susie Lee as Executive Creative Director and Matthew Fraracci as Executive Creative Director and Design Director, according to appliedartsmag.com. Tim Zimmerman directed creative as Creative Director and Associate Creative Director, while Jake Hulsebosch and Osman Rahmani served as Senior Copywriters on the project, per appliedartsmag.com. The team's decision to make the campaign website the primary creative artefact — rather than a film or an outdoor execution — reflects the public interest category's growing confidence in interactive advocacy as a craft medium.
PeopleNotPoultry.com functions simultaneously as editorial archive, emotional testimony, and action engine. Each individual profile on the site carries the weight of documentary specificity: a name, a sentence, a story. The letter-generation mechanic transforms that emotional investment into a measurable civic act, directed to [email protected]. This architecture echoes Last Prisoner Project's earlier "The Pen to Right History" campaign, created by McCann New York in April 2023, which used documentary-style film and letter writing to President Biden to similar ends, as documented by lastprisonerproject.org. Sid Lee's 2024 iteration sharpens that model by fusing it with a cultural calendar moment, giving the interactive mechanism a hard news hook that the earlier campaign's open-ended timeframe could not provide. In the United States public service category, the integration of real individual stories with a frictionless digital action step represents a high standard of purposeful craft.
The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100. Measured performance data for "Pardon People. Not Poultry." is publicly available and places the work among the more effective direct-action public service campaigns of the 2024 Thanksgiving period in the United States.
According to The One Club, the campaign generated more than ten thousand letters sent directly to the White House and achieved more than one million impressions. Those figures, for a nonprofit public service campaign operating without the media investment of a commercial advertiser, represent a structurally efficient conversion rate between awareness and action. The letter volume in particular is a direct measure of civic intent rather than passive exposure, which makes it a more meaningful indicator of campaign effectiveness than impression counts alone.
Recognition from the industry's most credible evaluating bodies confirms the creative community's assessment of the work. The One Show awarded the campaign a Merit in Interactive and Mobile for Good in 2025, according to oneclub.org. Applied Arts Magazine, as reported by appliedartsmag.com, documented that Marketing Awards gave the campaign Gold in both Public Service Integrated Campaign and Public Service Online in 2025. The Clios shortlisted the campaign, and the Webby Awards gave it an Honor in digital advocacy, both as reported by linkedin.com. Across the United States public interest sector, a dual Gold from Marketing Awards alongside One Show recognition positions "Pardon People. Not Poultry." as a benchmark execution for interactive advocacy campaigns that pair cultural timing with direct civic action mechanics. The awards recognition also validates the campaign's technical and strategic integration across online video, web, social, and donated out-of-home media in Washington, D.C.
"Pardon People. Not Poultry." is a 2024 Thanksgiving public service campaign created by Sid Lee for Last Prisoner Project. It contrasts the President's annual turkey pardon with Americans still incarcerated for cannabis offenses, directing viewers to PeopleNotPoultry.com to send letters demanding federal clemency directly to the White House.
Sid Lee created the campaign, marking the agency's first collaboration with Last Prisoner Project. The creative leadership included Chief Creative Officer Ali Stewart, Executive Creative Directors Susie Lee and Matthew Fraracci, and Senior Copywriters Jake Hulsebosch and Osman Rahmani, as documented by appliedartsmag.com.
The campaign generated more than ten thousand letters to the White House and more than one million impressions, according to oneclub.org. It ran across online video, web, social, radio, and donated Washington, D.C., media placements, earning a Clapboard Score of 64 out of 100.
The campaign received a One Show Merit in Interactive and Mobile for Good in 2025, per oneclub.org. Marketing Awards gave it Gold in Public Service Integrated Campaign and Public Service Online in 2025, per appliedartsmag.com. The Clios shortlisted it and the Webby Awards gave it an Honor in digital advocacy, per linkedin.com.
PeopleNotPoultry.com lets visitors scroll through named individuals incarcerated for federal cannabis offenses. Selecting any name automatically generates and sends a letter to [email protected] calling for that person's pardon, turning passive awareness into a direct civic action with a single click, as documented by lastprisonerproject.org.
Last Prisoner Project's earlier campaign, "The Pen to Right History," launched in April 2023 by McCann New York, used documentary film and letter writing to advocate for cannabis clemency, according to lastprisonerproject.org. "Pardon People. Not Poultry." advances that model by anchoring the same letter-writing mechanic to the Thanksgiving turkey pardon moment.
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