The future of Brazil’s rainforests is in our hands

The opportunity to work on a public-facing campaign for one of the world’s leading environmental charities can be as daunting as it is exciting.

There’s a weight of responsibility to create something that will not only have an impact (ie actually work), but also maintain the integrity of a respected brand. There’s often a fine line between devising a campaign that gets noticed and one that misfires. 

These were our thoughts when WWF-UK approached us asking for a campaign to help tackle the destruction of the Cerrado region, Brazil. 

Most people outside of Brazil haven’t heard of the Cerrado, but it’s a pretty incredible place. It covers one-fifth of Brazil’s surface area and is home to 5% of all life on earth. The planet needs the Cerrado — yet it is disappearing at a devastatingly fast rate, largely due to the intensive farming of soy.

WWF had been working with soy producers in Brazil to find a more sustainable way of farming. The result was soy cultivated by the Round Table on Responsible Soy (RTRS). They had the solution — they just needed to persuade UK supermarkets to start stocking it. This meant firstly convincing supermarkets’ most important stakeholders: their customers.

Asking consumers to care

This represented WWF-UK’s brief to us: how do we get UK supermarket shoppers to care about a place 6000 miles away from them? And care enough that they would email their supermarket asking them to source a different, more responsible kind of soy.

There were some challenges. Most people in the UK don’t know about the Cerrado — it’s not the Amazon, the Great Barrier Reef or those other icons of nature, even though it’s arguably as important.

Added to that was the fact that that most people (ourselves included at the time) didn’t really understand the role of soy — “But I don’t eat much soy” being the common refrain. In truth, the problem is not the soy we eat or drink but the massive amount that’s fed to the animals we consume: ‘embedded soy’ as it’s known.

The campaign had to do two things: make people care about a region they’d never heard of, then make it clear what their role was in saving it. Not easy.

“The future of the Cerrado is in our hands” was   the message. How to show that was our creative challenge. 

With stories like the Cerrado you have to try to find a connection. It’s a case of asking: what do people care about and how can we relate that to the cause in hand? While UK shoppers might not know (or care) about the Cerrado, many will know and care about  the incredible animals that live there — the armadillo, the giant anteater, the maned wolf. Fascinating, characterful animals whose habitat was being destroyed. 

The power of ‘home’

We took the decision to make animals a key part of the story, but we wanted to do this in a way that was different to the usual photo of an animal looking sad with an emotive headline.

Our initial idea of filming someone dressed as an armadillo walking around supermarkets asking if people would take him home (because his real home, the Cerrado, was being destroyed) was perhaps rightly turned down by the client. It was too silly a campaign for an organisation
as serious as WWF.    

Instead we designed something beautiful and unashamedly earnest. No jokes, nothing too clever. Just a film that showed how precious the Cerrado was and how we — the supermarket shopper —  could save it. 

Making a case in 60 seconds

“Could we recreate the Cerrado out of people’s hands?” one of us asked. “Yeah, probably” was the response. This was how we ended up in a film studio in London with a filmmaker from New Zealand and a magician-come-shadow artist from Argentina making animal shapes with his hands.

It was as bizarre as it sounds but the result was something really special. A genuinely beautiful, unusual piece of art that told the story of the Cerrado and how its future was in our hands — in just 60 seconds.

Films don’t promote themselves, so we put into place a community management strategy to make sure the film, and the story of the Cerrado, got people talking and sharing online.

We supported the film with other pieces of content, including an infographic showing in simple terms the connection between soy
and the consumer.

A good idea isn’t enough

Still, there’s no guarantee that a film, no matter how lovingly crafted, will resonate with people. Happily this one did. 

The film racked up more than 160,000 views worldwide, prompted more than 28,000 emails to the ‘big seven’ supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Waitrose, Marks & Spencer’s, Co-op and Asda) and helped to persuade Waitrose to stock only RTRS soy. 

In a strange turn of events, the film  also ended up being shown on Japanese breakfast TV, a first for Neo and WWF. 

For us, the success of this film is testament to the importance of craft and artistic integrity. A good idea is not enough. You need that idea to be realised and made better by artists — animators, musicians, magicians even — who are masters of their craft and will go further and fight harder to create something special. 

It’s then that a good idea becomes truly great, and that’s when the magic happens.