Sky Ocean Rescue

Role: User researcher/ Strategist

Project: Ocean Outdoor’s annual digital technology competition

The opportunity:

This project came about by myself and another Strategist proactively approaching a new arm of our Sky client, Sky Ocean Rescue.

The idea won Gold in the commercial category of Ocean Outdoor’s annual digital creative competition (£100K in free media) which fosters the creative potential of digital out of home.

My role as Strategist was to create the brief, help our creative teams mould the idea and write-up the award submission.

The idea:

We started with a scary fact: by 2050, the plastic polluting our oceans will outweigh the marine life. Most people know the ocean’s in trouble, but few actually realise that it’s their day-to-day single-use plastic consumption that is causing so much of the damage. Our challenge was to help people make the connection between the single-use plastic they use and the negative impact that was having on our oceans.   

To highlight this environmental risk, we created The Ocean’s Biggest Threat, a digital out of home campaign for Sky Ocean Rescue.

The aim was to encourage passers-by to discover what is the most menacing danger lurking in the oceans by filling the screen with the silhouette of a menacing, deep sea creature, accompanied by the headline “Discover the ocean’s biggest threat”.

Participants were then invited to use their mobile phones to connect with the screen via its free wifi.

A combination of 3D technology, video and streamed data then turned their phones into virtual torches which were used to detect what was really casting the shadow on the screen. At this point, the torches revealed that the biggest threat to our oceans isn’t sharks or sea-monsters, but single-use plastic. The campaign allowed us to mix creativity, technology and data to push the boundaries of what is achievable in modern billboards.

Key to this campaign was to make people realise that the plastic they use is what’s contributing to the waste in our oceans. To help people make this link, the interactive campaign ran at Westfield London, where everyone has their hands full of single-use coffee cups, plastic bags and bottles. We worked with Westfield London to create a plastic bag amnesty, encouraging visitors to say no to single use plastic bags for the day by accepting reusable non-plastic Sky Ocean Rescue totes instead. The campaign also ran in Glasgow and Manchester shopping districts.

Judges comments:

Ocean head of marketing Helen Haines said: “This clever campaign harnesses the scale and technology of spectacular digital out of home to tackle one of the biggest causes of ocean pollution; the plastic bag. Its powerful, imaginative message bowled the judges over, making WCRS and Sky Ocean Rescue deserving winners of our competition.”