This ad is not only brutal, shocking or gore: An airplane engine humming crescendos in the background as polar bears drop out of the sky, slam to the ground and meet their (very) bloody deaths. An imagery close to the worst of the 9/11 tragedy itself,

But this ad, from a climate change communications perspective, also presents all the elements of a counter-productive strategy, which might very well end up being totally ineffective at  driving behavioral change and engagement, as Ed Gillespie, co-director of sustainable communications agency Futerra, wrote in The Guardian’s Environmental Blog:

“Certainly it’s controversial imagery will garner press interest, after all I’m writing this analytical blog for starters, and for campaigning organisations with limited budgets and only one bite at the media cherry this is crucial. However I’m still not sure it will change behaviour, the danger is that by pumping up the high octane drama of an ad, you increase the risk of viewers feeling manipulated and dismissing it as pure propaganda. Or lapsing into highly questionable failures of tact and taste in pursuit of ‘edginess’.”

In the end, again, such ad will generate some sort of buzz online & offline and perhaps will get awarded at advertising festivals, but it will not generate any positive result for Plane Stupid and the cause they defend over the longer-term.

What we call climate porn (i.e. presenting apocalyptic visions of climate change, etc…) remains mostly commercially motivated…rather than mission-driven!

To watch the ad, click here.

Credit Image: Steve Cole, Getty Images

]]> http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/11/25/non-ad-of-the-day-13/feed/ 0 http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/11/23/leading-to-cop15-understanding-chinas-position-on-climate-change-an-edelman-paper/ http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/11/23/leading-to-cop15-understanding-chinas-position-on-climate-change-an-edelman-paper/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:58:38 +0000 admin http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/?p=851 COP 15 is now few weeks (if not days) away, the clock is ticking. But the recent Singapore announcement did not help in bringing some hope, as, confirming doubts that had been growing for months, the world leaders in attendance at APEC — along with Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen — announced that a legally binding deal on climate change would be impossible to achieve at the U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

With no tangible COP15 outcome in sight, many eyes have turned to look at China, whose position on climate change got widely debated. But often, as many other commentators noted (here and here), much of this debate has been based on misinterpretations of the domestic drivers behind the climate change issue in China.

Therefore, with my colleagues at Edelman Shanghai, we developed an Insights Paper on China’s position on climate change (that you can download here) with the aim of providing a more “holistic” picture of what the issues are on the ground in China, how these are influencing China’s climate change diplomacy, and how, from a communications perspective, better engaging Chinese stakeholders (government, consumers, companies) on this issue by actually re-framing the debate (and the terms of the debate, for a deeper analysis, check this out).

I don’t usually publish agency or client-related content on Sustainability Conversations, but the aim of this blog is to take part to existing conversations and share insights, and COP15 is for sure part of this. Of course, please let me, and my colleague @ilsevs, know your comments and thoughts on this paper.

Thanks again to all the people who contributed time and insights to this project (here, here, here and there) and furthered (I hope!) our understanding of a critical, yet extremely complex issue.

To download the Insights Paper, please click on the picture above or here.

With the negotiation of a new climate treaty coming up in December, the web and social media have quickly appeared as the “new” way to organize climate action, both online and offline:

• By trying to move away from feelings of despair, indifference, or fear, as people can get empowered to make a difference, and to be part of something BIG. To become agents of change.

• By focusing on leveraging horizontal conversations, i.e. peer-to-peer conversations (family, friend, someone ‘like me’) that are the most trusted sources of information, rather than just from top to bottom (via elites), in order to raise awareness and trigger engagement.

• In few words… by attempting to make COP 15 a collective referendum on our future, with everybody being part of the debate … and the solution.

But are we getting this right?

Copenhagen is undeniably driving a lot of innovations and experiments. However, Blog Action Day today got me thinking about all I have seen, read or written about so far.

• Are we all singing the same song?

UNEP, Hopenhagen, TckTckTck, 350.org, Energy Action Coalition, and many others (including movies such as Home or Age of Stupid) – All organizations have been working to catalyze and inspire web-connected communities to take action for the climate, in some very creative ways.

However, what can we hear among this ‘noise’? Is there any single and consistent message we can get out of it? Urgency? Building the world for the future generations? or Hope? or Green = Good for the economy?

Aren’t we in the end increasing citizens’ eco-fatigue? Are citizens tired of being exposed to so many messages, or being exposed to such cacophony?

• Are we pushing the right buttons ? Are we telling the right story ?

Are we efficiently helping people connect the dots and clearly understand why December 2009 will be so critical to their future, and how climate change relates to them as individuals, i.e. to what they care the most, to what they are concerned about the most? Are we putting climate change in the right context, i.e. an issue for the world or an issue for your health? For your job? Etc..

• Are we using the right levers?

In the age of the social media, it is key to engage in a decentralized and democratic way, by giving the voice to the people. However, are we also mobilizing key influencers of all stripes, both online and offline (i.e. influential business leaders, and entrepreneurs, etc?)

In the end, the key question is are we getting COP15 and the climate change issue mainstream? Are all these social media strategies creating a cultural shift? Long-lasting engagement? Are we still trying to raise awareness or are we ready for action?

I am asking more questions that providing answers in this post as I believe this is a discussion we should all have today. So what are your thoughts?

All campaigns are being pretty innovative and make great use of digital communications tools through social networking sites, video sharing.

The best one I have seen so far is the six-month “Tck Tck Tck” awareness campaign, launched in June 09 at the Advertising Festival in Cannes by former Secretary-General of the United Nations and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kofi Annan, along with his Global Humanitarian Forum. “Tck tck tck” – digital shorthand for the countdown to Copenhagen and the urgent need to address global warming – is an open-source campaign, which invites consumers and ad agencies worldwide to come up with creative ways to call for world leaders to sign up to a tough international deal on climate change by cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

As part of this 360 campaign, a “musical petition” involving some 60 world celebrities in the name of climate change has been launched on Oct. 1^st. Created by Euro RSCG’s music label, The:Hours, the petition can be signed by downloading the new version of 1980s Midnight Oil hit Beds Are Burning, from the internet (link here) and free of charge; the song is going to be the soundtrack to this movement.

Beds Are Burning (Tck Tck Tck: Time For Climate Justice) on Vimeo.

Lyrics include: “How can we dance when our world is turning? How can we sleep when the beds are burning?”. The choice of the song is very symbolic as it highlights the greatest humanitarian challenge facing mankind today, and the need for us, “Earth natives”, to take our responsibilities, as much as the original political song urged the “Western World” to take their responsibilities and give the land back to Native Australians.

To be followed…

From the Blog Action Day website:

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.

Climate change affects us all and it threatens more than the environment. It threatens to cause famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees.

Given the urgency of the issue of climate change and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December, we think the blogosphere has the unique opportunity to mobilize millions of people around expressing support for finding a sustainable solution to the climate crisis.

We encourage you to write about climate change in the context of how it relates to the topic of your blog. To help you start thinking, here are a few ideas about how you might connect climate change to things that you might already write about:

• A Technology or Business blog might write about emerging clean tech and how innovative companies might be able to help address the problem of climate change.
• A Health or Lifestyle blog might write about how climate change will affect our children’s health and daily living.
• A Nonprofit or Political blog might write about how climate change is deeply connected to many other issues – such as poverty and conflict.
• A Design blog might write about new trends in eco-friendly or sustainable design.
• A Travel blog might write about the places you want to see now before climate change makes them difficult to access or, well, under the sea.

Mashable, Global Voices, and some others of your favorite blogs will be participating. And you?

However, the genius and creativity of the ‘Melting Ice Men’ made it all: in bid to draw attention to global warming, and urge the German government to take action at Copenhagen, ice sculptures in the shape of humans were placed on the steps of the music hall in Gendarmenmarkt public square in Berlin, on Sept. 2.

Within 30 minutes,  the 1,000 ice sculptures created by artist Nele Azevedo had already began to melt, thus symbolically raising awareness on the possible effects of the global worming.

The operation/art installation was a great success, generating both domestic and international media coverage (The Telegraph, The Washington Post, Yahoo News, The Toronto Sun, etc..) , as well as a great amount of photos taken on site, shared online, and widely commented on blogs and micro-blogging platforms, etc.

A great piece of art-icy work done by Nele Azevedo, who was not a first-timer, and who mastered the use of her art in a very disruptive, yet poetic manner!

Again, I am pretty amazed to see how two powerful medium such as art and advertising can reinforce each other and be a very efficient, and innovative, way to spread a message and letting  citizens/people reflect on the effects of climate change, such as this Polar Bears ad for EDF in the US.

What do you think? Have you ever encountered any art-vertising of that kind?

Sources: Adland.tv and QG-RemarkableAdvertising

Credits Images: Reuters

]]> http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/09/17/adctivism-of-the-day-10-wwfs-melting-ice-men-in-germany/feed/ 0 http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/09/09/non-ad-of-the-day-9-wwf-brasil-911-and-climate-change/ http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/2009/09/09/non-ad-of-the-day-9-wwf-brasil-911-and-climate-change/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:37:12 +0000 admin http://www.sustainabilityconversations.com/?p=444 I believe that no one missed what has created a rather big controversy last week:  the Tsunami 9/11 ad created by DDB Brazil for WWF Brazil.

Months after running only once in a small Sao Paulo newspaper, the press ad has come back and been exposed to global condemnation and critics all over the social web with regards to the ‘poor taste’ its shockvertising approach.

What was condemned ? Using images of dozens of planes about to crash into New York City skyscrapers on 9/11 to illustrate the scale of the lives lost in the 2004 Asian tsunami… (See below). Definitely in the logic of comparing death tolls, the text says: “The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it.”

WWF Brazil and DDB Brazil first denied being responsible of this ad, before finally admitting it, while a a video version of the ad was appearing online…adding more to public outrage and DDB / WWF’s discredit. I will not go into the details but it appears that this ad was a pure ’scam’ used to win prizes at  advertising festivals and so forth.

But, is it really a good ad ?

What I am here more interested about is the ad itself, and its message. And how effectively such message can reach its target audience.

As you can see, the ad  uses imagery and icons that link to an event that shocked public opinion and that is now deeply embedded into our cultural representations and emotions. But we have been knowing for quite some time now that fear-inducing representations of climate change can be very counterproductive, as  fear is generally an ineffective tool for motivating genuine personal engagement, i.e. the public might think “It is too late”, “We are all going to die”.

As I wrote about it few times already, it is more effective to talk to individuals’ everyday emotions and concerns in  order to be the most engaging, that is to say  not only raising awareness but also ultimately changing behaviors and opinions.

Furthermore, the link between the Asian tsunami and climate change / environmental degradation has never been clearly made and scientifically approved as it resulted of an earthquake. The analogy used here seems a little ‘awkward’ and might create even more confusion.

9/11, a commonly used imagery in advertising

I made some research and I actually found out that the September 11 attacks have be widely used in advertising in order to deliberately shock the general public and draw attention to issues that often remained ignored or even denied.

This is especially the case with social and environmental issues, as in 2004, when MTV launched an advertising campaign to draw attention to the issue of anger in the world. Again, it seems that it was some sort of ’scam ad’ as the three print ads ran only once in a Brazilian magazine..and finally got a Bronze prize at the Cannes Festival. (see below)

Text next to the towers: 2863 deaths
Text next to the man: 40 million HIV infected in the world.
“The world united against the terrorism should do the same against AIDS”

Text next to the towers: 2863 deaths
Text next to the boy: 824 million undernourished people in the world
“The world united against the terrorism should do the same against hunger”

Text next to the towers: 2863 deaths
Text next to the boy: “630 million indigents in the world”
“The world united against the terrorism should do the same against poverty”

In France, The Nicolas Hulot Foundation, an environmentalist group, created an international advertising campaign quite similar to the WWF one: “For nature, everyday is 9/11″. Although, here the message is a little more subtle, and probably less shocking as it uses trees instead of the actual towers… (see below)

Some other ads have explored the 9/11 imagery for more commercial purposes such as this one from Cobis, an independent, Brussels based IT company providing IT and network infrastructure and … internet security solutions. (see below)

 True to Greenpeace’s traditional use of ‘non-violent direct action’ to generate noise and create effective disruption, a group of Greenpeace activists have shut down coal export facilities on the Queensland coast for the second day in a raw.

Why talking about this in an ‘Ad of the day’ post…well, because the campaign has also integrated  digital activism on the home page of 2 major online Australian newspapers – The Australian and The Courier Mail. The action shows activists painting the slogan “Toodle-oo Tuvalu? Your call Kev” across the home page.

As my great colleague and friend – @ilsevs, who shared with me this story - pointed out, such tactic is an ideal way of getting campaign message across to as many people as possible, and especially to key Australian decision-makers and political elite who represent a great part of the newspapers’ readership.

Of course, Greenpeace is also leveraging Twitter and its official website for live-updates as the campaign unfolds at the coal ports and in the media.

A interesting example of disruptive adverstising/adctivism for environmental purpose. Let’s see if any  positive change  will result from this campaign at the political level, especially as  fight against climate change is one of Kevin Rudd’s priority, and his favorite blogging topic…

Credits: Creative Director: Peter Novosel // Art Director: Taimi Soome //Account Management: Alison Ray