In Denmark you can't show Branded Content without explicitly stating who the sender is. But we had no reason to hide that WWF was behind this content. Rather the opposite.

According to WWF's annual Living Planet Report more than 50% of the world's wild life population has disappeared in 40 years. But how do you get that message out, with no media budget? Everybody has tried to watch YouTube videos that have been removed: You click to watch a movie but get a black screen saying "CONTENT NO LONGER AVAILABLE". We decided to use this to let people experience what happens when the world's wild life is NO LONGER AVAILABLE.

So we posted online videos with titles like "Cute Pandas Dancing", "Polar Bears Hugging" and "Lovesick Gorillas". These titles along with cute thumbnails appeared when you searched for animals. But once you clicked to watch the videos, all you got was a black screen with messages like "THIS CONTENT IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE DUE TO THE DEFORESTATION OF THE WORLD”.

We tagged the film with select search words like "animals", "gorillas", "wild life" etc. Add to this that the titles, the thumbnails and the description of the movies lead people to believe that they were going to see various movies of cute animals.

The videos was seeded through PR and blogs and soon caught attention.

761.000 PR and Twitter reactions generated 1.25 mio. media impressions worth 230.000 DKK worth of free media.

Not bad for a media budget of 0 DKK.

Content Extinct was a series of what looked like online film with cute animals that was integrated into the YouTube platform. We used all the cues known from animal films on YouTube: thumbnails showing cute animals and titles like "Lovesick Gorillas" and "Polar Bears Hugging". But in reality the films where very different from the traditional YouTube films. In fact they weren't really films at all.