America's Wild Horses Get Turned into Unicorns to Raise Awareness of Their Vanishing Numbers
Former global creative director of Mother London, Sasha Markova has launched a new Los Angeles based company called Gangs of Kosmos, and taken on the wild horses of America as their first client. They are possibly the first agency ever to represent animals directly. They are using an animal telepath to communicate directly with the horses to get client approval.
The wild horses are in trouble in America. A lot of them still live freely on public lands, but the cattle industries and energy companies are pushing them off the land for private interests. Yesterday (Tuesday July 18th), a crucial moment happened. The House Appropriations Committee voted to permit the shooting of healthy wild horses and burros. Now another vote happens in the Senate on Thursday July 20th to keep a historic No Horse Slaughter ban in place. If the ban is lifted, America might lose its status as a non-horse meat eating nation.
In response to this emergency, Gangs of Kosmos has launched their campaign for the horses, Save America’s Unicorns. Says Markova ‘we’re shifting the conversation with magic and fantasy to engage a whole new generation of wild horse lovers.’
The campaign lives on www.saveamericasunicorns.com and features a 90 second film. It also lives on an already highly engaged FB page, facebook.com/saveamericasunicorns. The campaign asks wild horse advocates to call and write to Capitol Hill to save America’s unicorns. Says the website ‘if we don’t do something now, America’s wild horses will soon be as mythical as the unicorn.’
The campaign was made with a new kind of creativity. ‘We pulled in a great gang to do this,’ says Markova. Creative favors poured in, pro-bono, from Mariano Cassisi, a former creative director of Mother London and New York; Turbo Dog, a CGI company; Jonathan Olinger, founder of Human, a social impact story platform; Gabriel Lifton Zoline, an ex-Obama campaign runner; Dirty Soup, a music company; Shawn Bohigian, a former Anomaly LA strategist; and a documentary film maker living with the wild horses, who is making an undercover film about wild horse slaughter and can’t be named.
‘This work represents a different kind of creative shift happening in the industry,’ says Markova. ‘Creatives are collecting together to make work they really believe in that can shift the story happening in the world right now. If you can connect a creative to that, they will go all out for you and, to overturn years of bad advertising karma selling chocolate bars, they will probably give you their best work.’
Gangs Of Kosmos bills itself as a purveyor of stories from a new paradigm, where humans are more connected to the kosmos around them and don’t see saving the world as an abstract chore, but intrinsic and intuitive in their DNA. ‘We want to tell stories that create an epic sense of oneness and connectivity to nature. Yes, we’re hippies. But that’s what the world needs right now.’
Said the wild horses through the animal telepath, ‘we love the work.’
If you can’t rely on an animal telepath, Gangs of Kosmos recommend you go to the Robert Redford/Elle Fanning favourite wild horse conservation organisation, Return To Freedom for further information.
