The brief
- Launch a tool that mobilises people to put pressure on Oreo over its use of dirty palm oil
- Get people angry, and empower their own creativity to produce social media assets raising this ugly truth
- Troll Oreo – use their own brand and visual identity against them
- Make Oreo worry about their brand and help force them to change their behaviour
- Provide a compelling product for Greenpeace supporters around the world
The client
Greenpeace UK came to us with a challenge: Oreo, the self-proclaimed ‘wonder-filled’ cookie, was a major purchaser of palm oil from one of the world’s dirtiest palm oil producers, Wilmar. And Wilmar’s palm oil is associated with rain-forest destruction, pollution, human rights abuses and more.
What could be done to make buyers realise that there was a dark side to Oreo? And could success be achieved by hijacking Oreo’s own successful social media presence?
The Greenpeace team had an idea for a tool that allowed users to build social media assets and share them on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. But they needed a creative solution to help ensure it was engaging, usable, and deliver it in just 5 weeks.
Our solution
Our creative approach was mobile first. An attractive mobile site highlighted the palm oil issue alongside a strong call to action, and then guided users through the steps needed to bring about change.
It took three different video assets, captured user-generated text, and combined them all to produce a single, final asset that was posted to social media or made available to download onto the user’s device for later sharing.
A series of branching user journeys, depending on the device and operating system, handled the variations of functionality allowed by each phone operating system and target social media platform (for example, Android users can save videos direct from web apps, iPhone users cannot; Instagram doesn’t support an API for personal accounts, etc).
For speed and to reduce server costs, the final video rendering was done using Amazon Lambda. This is a service that spins up small server nodes to handle singular tasks, and was used to handle the huge number of concurrent users on launch.
Impact
- Supporters produced 14,000 social media messages in just three weeks
- Campaign hashtag trended on Twitter
- A telling pause in Oreo social media activity – Greenpeace’s messaging owned the space!
- And the VideoMaker played a part in a huge win: Oreo promised to map all of its palm oil suppliers, use satellites to monitor them and suspend any suppliers that destroy forests
“Working with the Outlandish team was special. They turned around something truly impactful in a super tight turnaround time. The team dug into the detail, solved problems efficiently and produced a tool that no doubt got under the skin of our target brand on social media.”
Nicholas Monro, Digital Campaigner
Moving forward
After such a successful campaign we have worked with Greenpeace on other projects and tools.
A recent data viz campaign that highlights plastic pollution in our rivers has, at the time of writing, just gone live.
Also our UX designers have been working with Greenpeace International to create a new Planet4 ‘design system’. Design systems are consistent guidelines and UX components for user interfaces, which allow the Greenpeace team to launch new Planet4 campaign products faster and more on brand than ever before.
We love working with partners and clients wishing to produce positive social change – from battling corruption in Papua New Guinea, to fighting school funding cuts, to helping protect our environment with Greenpeace.
If you have a project that requires the design and development of web tools, data aggregation, dashboards, websites or campaigns, please get in touch!
