COPI took an ignored, invisible killer and made it visible, through a data-driven approach that reframed it in a completely new way. All achieved on a tiny, crowdfunded budget, thanks to:

Fresh insight: though people don’t care much about pollution, they do care about the price of the houses lining our streets.

Smart spending: by hijacking the property industry we tapped into its £1.7 trillion clout to generate short-term noise and long-term change.

Compelling strategic thinking: by attaching an intangible environmental issue to a capitalist model of self-interest, we weaponised homeowners’ fears and drove them to demand government

10,000 Londoners die prematurely every year due to toxic air. The Mayor of London has declared it a public health emergency.

Air pollution has recently been linked to infertility, premature mortality and Covid-19 fatalities - to name but a few of the harmful consequences.

But air pollution is an invisible killer. Unseen, ignored, and all the more deadly as a result. The data is there if you bother to look, but no-one was looking. How could we get Londoners to see the problem, and care enough to do something about it?

And, as a small crowdfunded campaign group with a limited budget, how could COPI:

-Source some cash to fund our campaign when we were starting from £0?

-Make enough cultural noise to get air pollution talked about in the short term?

-Create systemic change in the long term by making the public care enough to pressure the government?

We faced a clear challenge: though air pollution is the UK’s biggest environmental threat most people were ignoring the health risks, with their optimism bias telling them ‘ this won’t happen to me’.

As long as the public ignored the crisis so could the government, avoiding making crucial policy changes: bringing forward the ban on petrol and diesel vehicles from 2040.

So, we needed to find a credible way of getting people to face into the data, with the intention of driving them to lobby the government.

But first we needed to rally some funds - which we did through crowdfunding. Once we had raised some funds (£29,780), we needed to make them go as far as possible. With such a limited budget, a standard approach just wasn’t going to hack it, and we needed to use the clout of a much larger beast: the £1.7 trillion pound property market.

Previous campaigns focusing on the health risks only hadn’t hit home. So, to make Londoners open their eyes to air pollution and demand action, we tied it to something they care and talk about a lot: property prices. The average London home is worth over 500k, and is most Londoners biggest asset by a huge distance - any threat to its value is an emotive and highly engaging topic.

Working with King’s College London, we took raw data, accurate to 20msq and used it to build a 5 tier air quality rating system. The system linked the levels of the deadly pollutant, nitrogen dioxide, to any London address. To get it out there we built a website, addresspollution.org. The site not only revealed the health impacts of the property, but also the costs to their pocket - the higher the air pollution the bigger the financial impact.

We launched with a multi-channel guerrilla campaign that infiltrated the property industry. This allowed us to maximise our modest £29,780 by taking advantage of it’s £1.7 trillion clout.

By crunching the data we noticed that the most polluted areas were also the most expensive, and housed influential landowners with a direct line to Westminster. So in these areas we ran billboards that warned well-connected locals of the pollution.

We got even more targeted and projected ratings onto London’s most polluted residential buildings: including ‘Park Modern’, the most expensive development in the city.

We ran 650 real-time responsive DOOH at times of air pollution spikes, to make the dangers feel more immediate.

We ran small-space classified ads in the property listings, to get people in-market thinking about air pollution.

And we ran a direct mail campaign to warn estate agents of their new legal obligations to disclose our information.

WE MADE HEADLINES

We reached over 36 million people and were discussed on the likes of BBC, Good Morning Britain, Channel 4, Sky News, and made the front page of The Times twice.

WE DROVE DIRECT ACTION

Over 465,467 London households have generated an Air Quality Report. Far more than double the number of properties changing hands in London in any year.

WE CREATED INDUSTRY CHANGE

As a result of addresspollution, estate agents now have a legal obligation to disclose our information. Zoopla has made our system available. Another portal, Search Smartly, now use our API to produce Air Quality Ratings for every listing.

WE SHAPED GOVERNMENT POLICY

Local councils have adopted the measures homeowners petitioned for. The campaign was publically endorsed by the Minister for Health, and we achieved the policy change we lobbied for: to bring forward the ban on petrol and diesel cars from 2040.

See slide 10 in Supporting Document deck.