Free A Tree
Google Russia
Issue 24 | October 2012
Agency
Leo Burnett Moscow
Creative Team
Creative Director: Grisha Sorokin Art Director: Grisha Sorokin, Mikhail Derkach, Andrey Sergeev
Other Credits
Senior Account Manager: Marina Andzhich Producer: Alexey Kolokolnikov WWF Head of Service: Olga Pegova Advertising Coordinator: Anastasia Litenko Forest Programme Director: Elena Kulikova
Date
May 2012
Background
Leo Burnett Moscow and Google, in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), have launched an Android application “Free-a-Tree”. Using the innovative service Google Goggles, the creators of the application offer readers a chance to consider the value of reading e-books and to see the amount of wood saved once they switch from buying the paper version.
Idea
Where ever you may be – at a friend’s place, in a library, a shop, a café, or elsewhere – the application, with the help of Google Goggles, will identify any book by its cover and will browse for it in the catalogs of online stores that supported the project. Scanning the cover, the app will determine the number of pages, density and format of the paper. It will then show how much of a given tree it took to produce the paper book and will offer to buy an electronic version of it in one of the partner-stores, whilst a percentage of the proceeds will be donated to WWF.
The application also allows users to grow 5 types of virtual trees that are most commonly used in paper production. Every time, with the purchase of an e-book, one of the virtual trees will grow by the saved percentage. The results of the virtual trees grown by the users will appear in a global rating, and each user can share these through various social networks. All the achievements of the users in forest saving are available on a special site: http://freeatree.ru/">http://freeatree.ru/ .