CLIENT: NLWA
CAPABILITIES: ADVERTISING, COMMUNICATIONS, CONTENT PRODUCTION
THE BRIEF
North London Waste Authority had hit a recycling plateau.
Tonnage wasn’t going down, but it also wasn’t going up and it seemed those to blame for the stall were millennials. Our job was clear: create a communications campaign that motivates this hard to reach urban dweller to rethink their recycling habits.
REDEFINING RECYCLING COMMS
TO DRIVE BEHAVIOURAL CHANGE.
THE TRUTH UNCOVERED
It was true; recycling levels amongst young people were very low. It wasn’t awareness of
recycling that was the problem though, it was consideration of it. Our research into
awareness and message consumption amongst this group revealed that existing recycling
messages just weren’t being absorbed, because they were tonally detached and contextually irrelevant. Essentially, recycling had become its own worst enemy – it had so often proven itself preachy and boring that it had become a sort of cultural wallpaper.
CREATIVE STRATEGY:
To cut through, NLWA would need to disassociate itself from the preachiness and community
do-gooding
that had become hallmarks of this category’s messaging. So, we stripped away all the bits that young people were telling us were boring and irrelevant, and took the message back to one simple thing. Not throwing away really useful stuff.
Through a series of short videos, the Save Our Stuff campaign abandoned the Pavlovian switch-off word ‘recycling’ and inspired a new channel of thought by dreaming up a series of quirky dystopias in which European millennials lament living in worlds without recycled materials – it’s not tragic or catastrophic. It’s not even particularly scary. It’s just a bit rubbish.
At the heart of the message was a plea to evoke inherent responsibility – we know millennials don’t want to be ordered around or dictated to so this wasn’t a lecture, it was a memorandum: stop throwing away plastic, we need it for making trainers and stuff.
TRANSITIONING FROM BTL TO ATL MEDIA:
In order to catapult the message amongst our target audience, we also completely reinvented their media strategy. For the first time ever we transitioned NLWA from traditional door drops and bin stickers to a highly targeted ‘screen strategy’ which introduced broadcast TV, Social and Mobile Advertising and Video Seeding into the marketing mix.
