Cannes Lions

Trash Isles

AMVBBDO, London / PLASTIC OCEANS/LADBIBLE / 2018

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Case Film
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Overview

Entries

Credits

Overview

Description

In the North Pacific there is so much plastic an area of trash the size of France has formed. Governments have simply ignored it. So we found a way to ensure they couldn’t. By turning the country sized trash patch into an official country. On World Oceans Day, The Plastic Oceans Foundation and LadBible submitted an application to The United Nations to recognise The Trash Isles as an official country. Because if it is recognised as an official country, then other countries are obliged to help clean it up. We created an identity for the country and asked the public to support it by becoming citizens.

Execution

Having handed in our application to the Secretary General of The United Nations we then created a whole range of content to recruit citizens and raise awareness of the problem – all hosted on The Trash Isles Hub on the homepage of LADBible,

We had videos solely dedicated to educating people about the problem, experts in the area shared their stories through articles and interviews, we had celebrities pledging their support and speaking up on social media sites. Posters and web banners asked people to become citizens. All the countries assets, the money, the passports, the flag and the stamps, were sent to journalists to build intrigue. And partnering with Change.org we sent out targeted emails to get people to sign our petition to back the application.

The campaign recruited citizens and raised awareness of the problem not only through LADBible’s extensive network but through millions of earned media impressions.

Outcome

Over 220,000 people signed the change.org petition and became citizens.

We had 690,000 likes, shares and comments.

In total The Trash Isles campaign had over 50 million video views.

Utilising LADBible’s global network and through earned media we reached half a billion people with the campaign.

Fox News, CNN, National Geographic, Europe 1, IBT, Daily Mail, Reuters were just some of the major networks / papers that covered the campaign.

Big names celebrities in the category got on-board the campaign including Ale Gore and Sir David Attenborough.

All this led to a comment from the UN about the campaign and drove the issue to the front of the political agenda.