Iceberg Songs
UNFCCC
Issue 38 | March 2016
Agency
Serviceplan Campaign 3 GmbH & Plan.Net Campaign GmbH
Creative Team
Chief Creative Officer Alexander Schill Executive Creative Directors Alexander Nagel Christoph Everke Art Directors Matthias Schuster Kathrin Wetzel Christian Mittelmaier Dimitrios Arampatzioglou Copywriters Moritz Dornig Volker Heine Daniel Gassner Design Rebecca Labiner
Production Team
Production Company Buzzin’ Monkeys (Stefan Becker)
Other Credits
Public Relations Sabrina Alberti Sarah Fabry Project Management Yvonne Hopf Frederike Enk Karoline Schomberg Lukas Hohenberger
Date
November 2015
Background
In the first week of December 2015, the UN Climate Change Conference took place in Paris. The 'Iceberg Songs' initiative was launched just before the conference to raise awareness of the issues at stake.
Idea
When icebergs melted they made heartbreaking sounds. These had been recorded by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute in the Antarctic's Weddell Sea. It was as if the icebergs were crying.
A creative collective of serviceplan and production house Buzzin Monkey set out to turn these sounds into songs by making them available to musicians, who could interpret them as they wanted to. Artists such as Danish musician Trentmøller and Tom Sue Feat. Niklas contributed songs to www.icebergsongs.com.
The amount of time visitors to the site listened to the music was captured as evidence of public concern.
The site was both an auditory and a visual experience with images responding to the bass and treble notes.
Apart from the website and Facebook page, no other media was used.
Results
The objective was to reach 370 million media impressions, which was achieved thanks to the PR attention created by the idea.
Our Thoughts
Simple, beautiful and shareable. With a bit of money spent on it, this idea could have gone even further. I remember reading Paul Pohlman at Unilever saying that sustainability isn’t about being ‘nice’, it’s about economic necessity. Global warming is already costing his company €300 million a year. So perhaps they could be sponsoring this, investing in it and turning the sounds of global distress into music. I can’t help feeling this is a big idea that hasn’t actually acquired scale. Yet.