Action Pact Takes Thousands of Voices to the UN Climate Summit
The Background
This one goes back a while, but it earned its place here. It was a big campaign, it worked, it won awards, and it shows what Mettro can do when working alongside other creative teams on something that matters.
Greenpeace needed a website to drive public participation in the United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Sydney creative agency Circul8 brought Mettro in as a partner to build a campaign that would capture attention, engage the public, and get real people’s voices in front of world leaders. The result was Action Pact.
The Challenge
Getting members of the public to feel personally connected to an international political event is hard. The UN Climate Summit was happening on the world stage, far removed from most people’s daily lives. The campaign needed to close that gap and give people a genuine way to participate, not just observe.
Our Approach
Mettro built Action Pact using advanced 3D Flash capabilities (yep that’s how old this baby is!), XML-driven externalised content, and the Popul8 viral marketing system. Users uploaded a photo of their face through the Flash interface and used drawing tools to develop a personalised box robot character. The finished creation was packaged with a news story video and automatically emailed back to the user.
The video placed each user inside the campaign narrative, making participation feel real rather than token. Greenpeace selected their favourite user creations and displayed them on electronic billboards outside the Summit venue in Copenhagen, where UN delegates from around the world could see them. Facebook was also used to connect with Greenpeace’s existing supporter base, reaching over 250,000 fans through the platform. The web development and UX work was built to handle the campaign at scale.
The Outcome
More than 10,000 virtual packages were sent in the first week. By the end of the campaign, over 20,000 people around the world had submitted their slogans to the site. Greenpeace presented all of those submissions in Copenhagen.
Action Pact won an AIMIA Award for Best Science or Environment Website, a Silver BADC Award, and was an official Webby Awards honouree. The win came against agencies considerably larger than Mettro and Circul8.
