Greenpeace: There’s a Rang-tan in Our Awards Entry – How We Took Palm Oil from Obscurity to Centre Stage

Campaign details

Brand: Greenpeace
Client: Greenpeace
Agency: Mother London

Summary

This is a story in two parts, telling how a young orangutan turned a wall of ignorance around palm oil into front page news.

We were tasked with making palm oil as famous as plastics. Gulp.

Against such a challenging objective, the role of Strategy became that of Showrunner, positioning our story against the norms of aggressive cause-led advertising, to create a distinctive idea that would take on a life of its own.

To do that, we needed to go beyond the Greenpeace faithful to reach everyone else. From images of deforestation we'd seen before, to a new world we could control. And critically we needed to go from a Big Bang to a property that could last.

This led us to a creative idea that was generous, imaginative and big enough to excite not only the public but also the celebrities, businesses and partners that could add fuel to our flames.