Orizon
Greenpeace
Issue 46 | March 2018
Agency
Artefact, Paris
Creative Team
Creative Creative Director Romain Pergeaux Art Director Fabien Hujeux Copywriter Romain Pergeaux
Production Team
Production Producer Samir Semaoune Data Engineer Charles Darmon Data Scientist Samuel Houri Production Company De Gaulle Producer Edouard Bonnet Director Jonny Guedj Website Development Neuvième Page
Other Credits
Advertiser Greenpeace Brand Managers Laurence Veyne, Clément Schmitt Agency Managers François Brogi, Mehdi Lakhdar, Lucie Marchais Strategic Planner Jean Allary
Date
November 2017
Background
The COP23 Summit took place in Bonn in November 2017. It was an attempt to turn the Paris Agreement into real action.
Greenpeace wanted to remind the leaders, who were gathering at the meeting, that global warming was a very real threat with recent hurricanes, water droughts and floods providing stark evidence.
Idea
A real-estate agency called Orizon was launched with a YouTube film and online ads that encouraged people to visit http://orizon.immo, a website that predicted the future value of homes that would soon become waterfront dwellings, thanks to global warming.
On the site, visitors could select an area of France or Belgium to see what properties were available to buy now, and how they would become much more valuable seaside homes by 2100, thanks to global warming.
Visitors learned that though Orizon was fake, the algorithm predicting the rise in water levels was not. It had been developed from data gathered by GIEC, forecasting a rise in temperature of five degrees Celsius and an average rise of the sea-level of one meter by 2100.
Results
The campaign is still too recent for results to have been collated.
Our Thoughts
Irony can be a very effective weapon in the struggle to get people to take notice of what's happening around them. In a series of brilliantly-argued, long-copy ads, the great Howard Luck Gossage poured such mocking scorn on plans to flood the Grand Canyon in order to generate power from the dams that Congress simply could not pass the bill. More recently, Leo Burnett Chicago suckered people into keeping the town of Troy's library open by running fake ads inviting them to book-burning parties.
The townspeople's outrage got flipped into positive action.
Maybe this campaign will work well because it is horribly plausible. While we can see global warming as a bad thing generally, it is equally true that we could profit from it personally. Guilt will persuade us to give Greenpeace our support.