The Animal Copyrights campaign, created by WWF in collaboration with LatinStock, is an activation designed to provoke a direct response from users; To make them conscious of the importance of respecting the image copyrights of animals and to incentivize them to purchase images from the collection, whose proceeds go directly to benefit the animals themselves. The campaign resulted in an increase in recognition of the brand, attracting a public that had never before used or shown interest in stock image banks. On the other hand, WWF was able to generate awareness of the issue of animal rights among those in the editorial, photography, marketing and other sectors who are accustomed to using LatinStock as a stock image platform.

In 2014, photographer David Slater sued Wikimedia Commons, claiming authorship of a “selfie” taken by a monkey with his camera. A U.S. court recognized the lack of authorship of the image, ruling that it belonged to neither the photographer nor the monkey.

We wanted to take advantage the legal loophole to introduce: Animal Copyrights, a partnership between WWF and LatinStock to create the first collection of nature images created by animals whose authorship rights will be directly attributed to them. All the profits generated by these photos will be donated to the animals themselves.

As a result of the campaign, LatinStock’s website experienced a 300% increase in traffic, receiving a media attention and generating awareness of animal rights. The proceeds from the photo collection continue to grow, taking into account that the campaign is still in progress. Since the launch of the campaign, the number of WWF members has increased by 10%.

The campaign was launched on March 23, 2015 and since then the Animal Copyrights image collection has been available for purchase on LatinStock’s digital platform. In the same month as the launch, we released a series of online films on YouTube and we created a dedicated Instagram account. Both WWF and LatinStock promoted the campaign on their social networks as well through digital media

The campaign functioned perfectly as we had expected with our original plan.