A message to the PM
When he was elected prime minister, David Cameron promised to create the “greenest government ever”. Stop Climate Chaos (SCC) — a coalition of the UK’s leading charities including Oxfam, Greenpeace and WWF-UK — wanted to make sure he did.
SCC approached us looking for a campaign that communicated to Cameron and the rest of the cabinet a powerful economic argument for sticking to their green commitments.
While the environmental benefits of greener business had become clearer among policymakers and the public, the economic benefits were less well known. Yet a year prior to this campaign, more than a third of the UK’s economic growth had been generated from green business.
Green business meant business — and they wanted the PM to take note of this.
The campaign needed to coincide with one of the key political milestones of the year — in October, when MPs were returning to Westminster from the Conservative party conference and were about to vote on the Energy Bill.
A tight deadline can sometimes produce the best creative. You don’t have time to over-think it, you just have to get on with it.
SCC already had a stunt planned: a queue of workers in green hard hats designed to pastiche the famous Conservative Party ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster of the 1970s. We needed a print campaign to coincide with the stunt.
Against the clock
As is often the case with campaigning organisations, the deadline was pretty tight. Media space had been bought at some of London’s busiest tube stations, including Westminster and St James. We had 10 days from taking the brief to posters going up.
We came up with a number of different ideas, our favourite of which was a spoof of the famous Economist ad campaign of the 2000s (though with the iconic red replaced with green, naturally) — an idea that was probably a bit too clever and too much of an advertising creative in-joke, on reflection.
Straightforward creative
Our eventual creative route was a bit more straightforward and perhaps all the better for it. A clean, simple poster campaign that took traditional business imagery — a tie, a briefcase — and turned them green. Maybe a bit obvious, but sometimes obvious is what’s needed. Copy was similarly to the point.
We were happy with it. We’d met the deadline with some room to breathe, and managed to get a collective sign-off from a coalition of some of the UK’s leading charities, all with their own strong opinions. No small feat in itself.
Commanding attention
The campaign itself did ok. It got people noticing, talking, paying attention. It trended on Twitter, and it looked decent.
Did it work? It was hard to say at the time. As is often the case in the somewhat slippery world of government, the Energy Bill was postponed, then tweaked, then voted through in a slightly different form.
It wasn’t exactly the result we’d hoped for. You want to be able to tie things up neatly and say “yes, this worked, we changed this”. But you learn that the world of campaigning just isn’t neat. It’s about small victories followed by small defeats but hopefully, ultimately, winning in the long-run.
