Farmageddon
UN Water and Ending Hunger Movement of FAO
Issue 27 | June 2013
Agency
Saatchi & Saatchi Frankfurt
Creative Team
Executive Creative Director Jorg Riommi Digital Creative Director Sebastian Schler Creative Director Peter Huschka Senior Text Frank Baumbach Text Carlos Pabon Daniel Henner Art Director Nora von Kalckreuth Marius Pawiltza Patrick Hackmann
Production Team
Managing Director Dirk Gobel Digital Supervisor Jochen Ihl Project Manager, Digital Boris Zink Regional Manager Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Bigpoint Netta Emanuel Producer Sophia Ruppel (Farmarama Bigpoint)
Date
March 2013
Background
March 22nd was World Water Day, when different NGOs around the world wanted to draw attention to the fact that providing everyone, everywhere with safe, clean water was the first step towards building a better world.
The UN asked Saatchi & Saatchi to raise awareness of the serious problems experienced by 783 million people, who still lack clean water.
Idea
Farmerama was a free-to-play online farming game from Bigpoint with around 45 million registered players.
On March 22nd, players who opened up their accounts at www.farmerama.com were shocked to discover their farms had been hit by drought.
Their fields were dry, their grass was brown, their animals’ tongues were hanging out with thirst. Everything they had planted and cultivated was victim to the world’s first global water shortage.
Online farmers were given the choice of carrying on playing the game, helping to end the virtual drought by passing on the message about World Water Day or by making a donation for low-cost pumps and tanks for poor farmers in the real world.
They could also share the campaign on Facebook.
‘Farmageddon’ brought the hardship faced by millions in the undeveloped world to the attention of a wealthy Western audience and put them in touch with real agricultural projects around the world.
Results
In one day only and with a zero budget, the campaign resulted in 20+ million media impressions and generated more than 700.000 Euro earned media.
Our Thoughts
The trouble with us advertising junkies, we expect there to be breakthrough innovations all the time. But, of course, there can’t be. An idea needs time to consolidate, amplify and succeed before it metamorphoses into something wildly different. So we have seen this sort of takeover before. Ironically, WWF flooded Second Life in 2007. But that doesn’t make this any the less impactful to the many Farmerama players who would have wondered what the heck was happening. Being able to share the idea on Facebook is a significant development onwards and upwards from the WWF idea and would have widened the idea out way beyond the Farmerama community.