Situation

8 million tons of plastic is dumped in our ocean each year. Despite the scale of this problem and the massive areas this plastic is now forming Governments have simply ignored it and the public are unaware of it.

Brief

Draw the attention to the unacceptable amounts of plastic in the ocean and make governments take notice

Objectives

Make the public aware of the scale of the problem.

Get the press and public talking about the issue.

Get The United Nations to take notice of the campaign.

The Creative Idea:

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, 8^th June 2017, 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.

The Strategy

We needed a way for people to engage with a problem that sits miles out at sea.

By turning the country sized trash patch into an official country we not only achieved this but allowed them to understand the scale of the problem.

Our target audience were Ladbible’s young, politically active followers. Their online citizenship helped to spread the word about the campaign via social media. This young audience have grown up with a much more sustainable outlook on life, knowing they will have to be the generation that help to solve sustainability issues.

Big name celebrities signed up and helped us reach the full range of our audience, there were environmentalists such as Al Gore and Sir David Attenborough all the way to popular hip hop artist and famous actors such as Pharrell Williams and Chris Hemsworth

The Execution

Having handed in our application to the Secretary General of The United Nations on June 8^th 2017 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.

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

The Results:

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 Al 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.

In part due to the campaigns’ success plastic in the oceans has become a big discussion point around the world and 193 countries have pledged to tackle global crisis of plastic in the oceans at the most recent UN conference.

LADBible/The Plastic Oceans Foundation - Trash Isles

CREDITS

Paul Brazier

Michael Hughes

Dalatando Almeida

Greg Kates

Adrian Rossi

Alex Grieve

James Radford

Local partners

Gold partners