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The creatures it kills Greenpeace campaign creates images of animals endangered Jun 3, 2009 It's all around us, and we see so much of it that we ignore it. That's dirt. But dirt is a horrible environmental threat, killing the earth's creatures as one of mankind's worst pollutants. How do you get that message across to a world that hardly notices? That was the challenge Greepeace put before the creative team at McCann-Erickson Warsaw in Poland. The answer, in a word: dirt. "It was an ‘a-ha’ moment," say copywriter Darek Samul and art director Wojciech Szpor. "Since, according to the brief, we were to care about ecology and then polluted environment, then in order to fight against dirt, we thought we’d use … dirt." Which is exactly what they did. The agency sent out teams with large stencils of endangered animals such as whales. The teams placed the stencils over dirty vehicles, walls or floors, then cleaned off the grime, leaving behind crisp images of the animals, along with this message: "Lives in dirt, will disappear soon." Greenpeace also posted templates of the stencils on its Polish web site and invited visitors to help spread the message. Samul and Szpor say they received pictures showing postings of the creative at numerous locations. The campaign, which ran in February through April, worked on two levels. First it revealed the animals threatened with extinction, and against a backdrop of the very force that would lead to that extinction. Second, as the images were exposed to more dirt in the days and weeks after, they darkened, losing their crispness entirely and over time fading back into the grime. The effect was to illustrate in very dramatic fashion the ongoing effect of continued exposure suffered by these creatures. Of course, Greenpeace is hardly the only organization that has used this method to deliver its message. GoGorilla Media offers WaterStencils that do essentially the same thing on sidewalks, and Clorox did a similar campaign last year in California. The reason this one worked was because of the strong tie between the client and the medium. "Greenpeace has cared for ecology for years; therefore, it is a natural partner in striving for environment protection and focusing people’s attention to endangered species," Samul and Szpor say. "This time we have fought with dirt using dirt itself." The campaign also generated media buzz, getting picked up by a Polish news channel, several radio stations, and local newspapers across the country, as well as the Polish version of Digg.com.
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