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Change the world – watch an ad

Can advertising save the planet? In collaboration with MTV, a handful of adland's finest are giving it a go.

Six agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather, Lowe, Wieden + Kennedy and 180 Amsterdam, have made a series of commercials warning of the perils of climate change. MTV is a good platform for these messages. Its audience is young, energetic and unafraid of change.

And what of the adverts themselves? They're all pretty straightforward. There's nothing particularly insightful, except perhaps the ad from Ogilvy, which reminds us that we have only a surprisingly short time to save ourselves from global meltdown.

The project is an implicit call to arms. If the politicians are doing nothing for us, then we must do what we can ourselves.

The call to action, though, is merely to visit the MTV website

Adland
patrick collister thinks agencies should step up and help mobilise the masses
www.mtvswitch.org to see more of the adverts. What you can't find are details of the next meetings of Europe's heads of state. Nor can you find a DIY guide to building a barricade, ripping up paving stones and resisting a police baton charge. Yet surely this is what it's going to take to effect the sort of changes that are needed.

The commercials will attract sympathisers but what the cause needs are activists. The campaign looks well-intentioned but is ultimately neither penetrative nor immersive enough. The online component is missing.

So, all you creative directors at Ogilvy, Weiden + Kennedy etc, get your digital people involved and between you, you might come up with something that could help save the world.

Online is where most of your target audience is to be found, where they commune and hatch plans.

FIRST POSTED JULY 16, 2007