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For keen royal watchers, the Lindo Wing, a private maternity facility at St Mary’s Hospital in London, is synonymous with exciting announcements.
The birthplace of much of the Royal Family over the decades, including Prince William, this is where his wife Catherine delivered all three of the couple’s children.
At 5.34am on Monday, the Lindo Wing was the setting for an equally momentous birth – even if she is only a cartoon character.
She’s called Evie, and as the town crier tasked with broadcasting the news (live from outside St Mary’s on ITV’s Good Morning Britain) revealed, she is a third piglet for Mummy and Daddy Pig and a sibling for Peppa and George.
Small, pink, porcine and fictional she may be, but her arrival was covered by news outlets around the world. Millions of congratulatory tweets and other social media messages followed, with the notable exception of a few members of the farming community, who grumpily pointed out that pigs delivered litters not single piglets.
Yet even this wrinkle could not detract from the fact that since the animated adventures of Peppa Pig were introduced to the world in 2004, the cartoon – which to some is fiendishly irritating – has become an international phenomenon.
Broadcast in more than 40 languages and in more than 180 territories, Peppa Pig is now an empire, spanning TV, books, toys, clothes and even theme parks – with a reported worldwide value exceeding £1 billion.
It has also consistently proved to be a masterclass in global marketing, with Mummy Pig’s pregnancy news delivered in a carefully curated package by PR agency PrettyGreen under the careful tutelage of its managing director Sarah Henderson, a doyenne of campaigns for global giants including Nintendo, Snapchat and Cadbury.
Evie is a third piglet for Mummy and Daddy Pig and a sibling for Peppa and George
In the tell-all Daddy and Mummy Pig, speaking just hours after giving birth, gushed that the birth of their third piglet was ‘a miracle’
And if the agency had a remit to turn this simple cartoon into global news then they have surely fulfilled it.
Aping the behaviour of real life celebrities, among them Rihanna, whose decision to reveal her baby bump at the 2025 Met Gala earlier this month ‘broke the internet’, the announcement of Mummy Pig’s pregnancy in March was made in a ‘live’ TV interview on Good Morning Britain.
It was followed by a ‘world exclusive’ interview with Mummy Pig in women’s magazine Grazia, a publication more accustomed to covering the antics of A-list Hollywood stars.
It worked: the announcement quickly went viral, with 60 million views on GMB’s TikTok post alone, and covered by news outlets around the world.
Capitalising on the enthusiasm, last month the agency hosted a gender reveal party at London’s Battersea Power Station, where Mummy and Daddy Pig dropped a curtain to unveil that they were expecting a baby girl.
The towers of the iconic London landmark were lit in pink to mark the occasion.
This week’s birth announcement then, is just the latest step in a carefully curated PR stunt which was labelled ‘a stroke of marketing genius’ by Ben Roberts, content director at marketing bible License Global.
Yet even before this, there will be few parents in the UK who in the past two decades have not placed their toddler in front of an episode of Peppa, purchased some Peppa-themed merchandise, or in my case, removed the batteries from a plastic Peppa Pig car in order to cease transmission of its infuriatingly jaunty jingle.
Naturally, there are endless threads on social media forums where parents feverishly discuss anything from whether Peppa’s penchant for teasing Daddy Pig about his rotund stomach is in fact ‘fat-shaming’ to whether she is – as one Australian politician apparently suggested – ‘peddling a warped feminist agenda’.
All this from a series that emerged 21 years ago from an independent animation studio in London founded by a trio of friends who merely hoped, in the first instance, to produce something slightly different to what they saw as the poor quality and limited scope of other animated offerings of the time.
‘A lot of it was completely incomprehensible and all the girls were either princesses or ballerinas,’ series producer Phil Davies recalled in a 2008 interview. He and animators Neville Astley and Mark Baker came up with the idea of creating a confident, bright and cheeky female lead with a fiery personality reflected by her red dress, who loved jumping in muddy puddles.
The birth was announced with a royal-inspired twist on the classic royal birth announcement, complete with a town crier, a scroll-style proclamation
It took two ‘painstaking’ years, and a great deal of financial courage – back then, animation cost £5,000 a second even on a shoestring budget – before the first episode of Peppa Pig was broadcast on May 31 on Channel 5.
It was an immediate hit. Children were drawn to Peppa’s colourful simplicity – and the novelty of animal characters wearing clothes and living in houses while still emitting the occasional ‘oink’.
Critics, meanwhile, commended its relatable, easy-to-understand storylines. Nominated for a children’s Bafta, within a year Peppa had made £1 million in merchandise sales. From there, her trotters went on to scale dizzying heights. By 2009, the Pig family’s continually evolving exploits were raking in £100 million in merchandise, and two years later, in April 2011, the parents of excited Peppa fans were able to take their children to the world’s first Peppa Pig theme park in Hampshire.
Peppa has even become a pop star, with four studio albums to her name, among them last year’s Let’s Jump In! (Those muddy puddles are a well-trodden theme.)
Given Peppa’s phenomenal success, it’s little surprise that her creators became very wealthy, securing £47 million each from a deal in which a 70 per cent stake in their animation company was sold to an international distributor called eOne.
In 2019, entertainment giant Hasbro acquired the Peppa Pig franchise when it purchased eOne for £2.8 billion. Perhaps just as impressive as the ubiquity of its merchandise meanwhile (there are apparently 12,000 separate branded Peppa Pig items) is the way that this cartoon has managed to exercise such a grip on frazzled parents of all backgrounds.
In 2021, she was referenced by no less a figure than the then-prime minister Boris Johnson, who made a point of telling business leaders he had spent the previous Sunday at Peppa Pig World.
‘I think that it is pure genius don’t you? No government in the world, no Whitehall civil servant, would conceivably have come up with Peppa,’ he declared.
Perhaps not – but not everyone is a fan.
Peppa has been accused of all manner of misdeeds – everything from the aforementioned fat-shaming of Daddy Pig to setting a bad example to children with her plain talking that borders on rudeness (otherwise known as ‘being a toddler’ as one Peppa defender pointed out).
The couple are hesitant about adding a fourth child to their family, with Daddy Pig panicking before Mummy Pig jumped in to clarify: ‘ I think we’re more than happy with our family of five!
This last accusation was made by the august Wall Street Journal which, in a lengthy article last year headlined ‘Peppa is a brat’, suggested that some American parents were turning their back on her in favour of the more calming demeanour of Bluey, a rival programme focusing on the antics of an anthropomorphic six-year-old blue heeler puppy.
Even Mummy Pig, suggested one American viewer, is ‘emotionally abusive’ to Daddy Pig. ‘Are all British people so brutally blunt with their opinions and internal thoughts?’ users pondered on one forum. Others have pointed out the irony that while the series is rooted in simple family activities, it is viewed by small children glued to their screens.
There is arguably no such thing as bad publicity and perhaps because of, not in spite of it, Peppa Pig remains a huge commercial success, in part
down to a clever expansion of storylines and characters and by embracing multimedia with targeted online advertising.
Today, you can find Peppa Pig on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube as well as on TV platforms from BBC iPlayer to Netflix.
As we’ve seen from this week’s TV announcement however, Peppa’s owners are not averse to using more traditional methods to get their message across.
Whatever medium she is viewed in – and courtesy of that masterful marketing – Peppa is something of a celebrity in cartoon form, as one of her creators can testify.
‘When people with young kids find out I’ve got something to do with Peppa, they get a bit starstruck,’ Phil Davies recalled. ‘You get a small window into what it must be like to be an actor or rock star.’
