Sustainable World

Agency: Dentsu Creative
Client: Trees for Life / Market: United Kingdom

Trees for Life is an organisation with a commitment to rewild Scotland’s historically significant Caledonian Forest. Their vision is to revitalise the Scottish Highlands and restore the forest to its former glory. The forest once covered much of Scotland and Trees for Life has been renewing this essential woodland to offer a much-needed habitat for wildlife such as red squirrels and pine martens. Alongside providing an environment for animals to flourish and thrive, this wild forest will reduce the impact of climate change by storing carbon, preventing flooding and erosion, and providing opportunities for hundreds of thousands of people to reengage with wild nature.

In 2021, dentsu Scotland established a platinum partnership with Trees for Life. The first step to support our own Social Impact goals was to stop the practice of posting out traditional Christmas cards. We then created an interactive website using cutting-edge WebGL software to launch our partnership with the expertise of Trees for Life. In order to inform and inspire audiences on the importance of the work the charity is doing, we created a short, animated film that takes visitors back 7,000 years to the time when much of Scotland was covered by an intricate network of forest. The film describes how this once-diverse ecosystem has been destroyed by human influence and shows how Trees for Life is committed to restoring and protecting such a vital and majestic landscape. We have also secured donations on behalf of our clients and our Social Impact team is organising dentsu employees to donate their time for hands-on support of this Scottish Highland revival.

Agency: Carat
Client: Standard Chartered / Market: Singapore

Standard Chartered has a strategic net-zero plan to move away from investing in carbon- intensive industries and companies. They partnered with dentsu to communicate their commitment to green finance.

Dentsu has raised awareness of Standard Chartered’s industry-leading vision to become the world’s most responsible and sustainable bank by co-creating an ongoing global multi-media campaign. This message of their net-zero journey not only engages existing customers but also highlights the priority of a net-zero transition to new audiences.

We are committed to working with our clients on their own net-zero journeys, so we were excited to work with Standard Chartered to raise awareness of their vision.

Through a global multi-media campaign, we worked with them to help communicate their own net-zero plan and demonstrate how they are supporting green finance, moving away from investing in carbon-intensive industries and companies.

Agency: Carat UK, The Story Lab
Client: Co-op, ITV, Hubbub / Market: United Kingdom

Co-op has long been committed to reducing their food waste in stores and helping their customers reduce their food waste at home. Their community fridges help reduce food waste by redistributing surplus food, while meeting the needs of diverse populations in a shifting economy. This commitment is more important than ever with an increasing cost of living and poverty crisis impacting homes across the United Kingdom.

Co-op community fridges are places to bring people together to eat, connect, learn new skills and reduce food waste. To get the word out they ran a Community Fridges initiative with food waste charity Hubbub and partnered with dentsu to promote it. Having funded 350 community fridges with Hubbub already, this partnership aims to grow across the United Kingdom, eventually preventing up to 26 million meals from going to waste annually. To foster this growth we launched the ‘Community Fridges at Christmas’ campaign to inspire our audiences around this sustainable consumption issue and demonstrate the power of the initiative. During a two-minute live film, we ran a TV campaign showcasing one of these community fridges in action at an Afghan- and Central Asian-associated community centre.

Collaborating with ITN, ITV and Lucky Generals, the live ad, which showed celebrities Dermot O’Leary and Big Zuu learning to cook using community fridge ingredients, filled an entire advertisement break during the Christmas season. To maximise the impact the campaign also went live during popular television show Coronation Street.

The campaign highlighted the significance of community in a positive way with real-world impact, driving awareness of growing food-security issues in society. Audiences were inspired to think about food waste and poverty in society by the ad spotlighting volunteers and their important work at the vibrant community fridge.

The impact of the campaign was heightened by corresponding with the unique time of reflection that accompanies the festive holiday season. The ad premiere reached almost two million people when it aired, and the total activity went on to reach over four million people.

Speaking about the impact of the campaign, Ali Jones, Customer and Community Director at Co-op, said: “Our unique live advert will remind people that while not everyone can enjoy the same Christmas this year, by cooperating we can create a fairer world in the future.”

Agency: Dentsu Creative, Carat
Client: Kraft Heinz, Channel 4 / Market: United Kingdom

Kraft Heinz has long been a supporter of emerging food tastes. Already having many vegetarian products, Kraft Heinz wanted to promote their new plant-based product range that is so important to a younger audience. Flexitarian trends are emerging and Kraft Heinz wants to serve that community in an approachable and practical way.

To connect with this community dentsu partnered with 4Studios to create Flex Kitchen, a five-part digital comedy cooking series. Each ten-minute episode takes a beloved comedian and sets them up for a cooking challenge using ingredients from the new product range. To create a positive and authentic connection we harnessed the power of comedy. A recipe-based approach showcased how Kraft Heinz’s range can easily be incorporated into consumers’ lives. The content presented a clear message: Kraft Heinz can reduce meat consumption without compromising on taste or enjoyment.

Using products from Kraft Heinz’s range, the UK comedians cooked for a group with plant-based dietary requirements. In the first episode, actor and comedian Kerry Godliman was challenged to cook for a vegan rugby club post-training, while episode two saw writer and comedian Lou Sanders attempt a vegan biryani for a group of morris dancers.

Each episode was promoted on Channel 4’s and Kraft Heinz’s Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube accounts, with on-demand viewing and television reaching even further. The content, hosted organically on All4, achieved 4.3 million views, with three more episodes still to come. Recognition was highest among younger audiences, and recall levels were high.

Matt Hill, Marketing Lead for Kraft Heinz Meals, said: “Not only will it showcase our portfolio of plant- based products, but we hope to inspire flexitarian audiences all over. We’ve always been and will continue to be passionate about producing delicious plant-based food.” The campaign’s popularity among younger audiences demonstrates the power of delivering an important message on sustainable consumption through a light, comedic approach.

Agency: Ymedia Wink iProspect
Client: IKEA / Market: Spain

IKEA has been a trailblazing supporter of sustainable consumption over the years. Its furniture is designed to be resold, repaired and reused. However, IKEA needed to actively change the notion that their products are semi-disposable and at odds with their commitment to sustainability. Dentsu collaborated with IKEA to develop multiple campaigns to highlight IKEA’s sustainability practices and support of the new circular economy with sustainable product sales.

In 2021, we partnered with IKEA in Spain to promote IKEA’s commitment to climate issues by creating something truly impactful, sustainable and different. We devised the ‘Activists Without Knowing It’ campaign, spotlighting action that linked ecological gestures in the home with environmental data to show that it is easy to live in a sustainable way. A documentary web series that achieved 16.6 million views on digital channels, 5% above the objectives set, inspired households and companies to play their role in sustainable behaviours.

‘Black Friday’ is notorious for driving excess, and often unnecessary, sales. This promotional flurry is unsustainable, and at odds with our resource- constrained world. IKEA set about ‘hacking’ the overconsumption event Black Friday to create ‘Green Friday’ instead. By focusing on IKEA products’ durability, we created a campaign around a sale featuring only used IKEA products. This used-furniture sales service set out to help consumers engage in the circular economy, increasing visibility of the company’s sustainability initiatives in the media and positioning IKEA as a socially and environmentally positive force.

We addressed the emblematic, but paper-hungry, IKEA catalogue in our digital campaign by encouraging customers to access the catalogue in its digital format. Although the catalogue can also be found in stores, it is a priority, and a key component of IKEA’s path to sustainability, to drive customers to the more environmentally friendly digital version with targeted campaigns. The campaign generated 1.8 million visits to the digital IKEA catalogue.

Overall, the Activists Without Knowing It, Green Friday and digital catalogue campaigns inspired consumers to think more about their own consumption habits, highlighted the sustainability of IKEA’s products and showed customers the steps IKEA is taking to support sustainability through digital choices. Overall, the combined campaigns received upwards of 600 million impressions.

Customers want to make sustainable choices and IKEA has created a community in which these choices are easy to make and create tangible and immediate impact.

Agency: dentsuMB
Client: Ant Group / Market: China

Environmental campaigns can feel a little overwhelming, often conveying a sense of imminent crisis. Audiences can understand the implications of environmental issues, but feel powerless and do not know where to start. Alipay understood this, and wanted to encourage people to establish environmental awareness and easily achieve environmental protection in daily life.

Our dentsu mcgarrybowen agency partnered with Alipay’s green initiative, Ant Forest, to inspire their customers to live a lower-carbon life with easy-to- implement behaviour shifts. Together we created This is very Green, a series of films for social media featuring a range of animals in the forest. Our forest inhabitants explain how customers can play their part in a greener future, using a combination of humorous metaphor and hard-hitting messaging: an elephant tells us to use fewer disposable straws as it sucks up rainwater with its trunk, and a crab tells us to use fewer disposable chopsticks while flexing its claws.

The original films set out eight ways to adopt a greener lifestyle and were also created using a low-carbon method. We did not require travelling or shooting, which minimised our carbon footprint in production. The engaging campaign put across these important ideas in a memorable, clever way, ensuring the sustainable message was long-lasting for our audience, increasing brand loyalty and reinforcing a commitment to sustainability. Across two weeks, over 1.23 billion were reached with the campaign, and it tallied over 600,000 interactions globally.

Agency: Merkle
Client: Starbucks / Market: United States, Canada

Starbucks wanted to celebrate their brand mission “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time” during Earth Month in the United States. They set out to spark joy and enthusiasm around environmental issues by engaging customers with a customised game.

Merkle, a dentsu company, partnered with them to create the Starbucks Earth Month Game for mobile devices. The goal was to educate their Rewards members on the brand’s commitment to sustainability and to increase engagement. The game includes a puzzle with weekly activities to challenge members to learn more about sustainability.

Every time a player passes a level, they earn a vote for where they’d like Starbucks to donate their 250,000 trees to a charity that supports reforestation globally. The game also offered sustainable prizes such as an electric bicycle, a reusable coffee cup or a vegetarian food item. The game also highlighted the Starbucks FoodShare programme, which packages unsold food from their stores, delivering meals to non-profit organisations around the United States.

The first-of-its-kind app for Starbucks Rewards members encouraged sustainable behaviours by letting gamers play, learn and earn. The app raised awareness around issues such as biodiversity, reforestation, clean water and climate stability, and engagement soared as more than 2.5 million sustainable prizes were given away.