Campaigns for a cause: World Oceans Day.

World Oceans Day is a global celebration of our ocean, where everyday people and brands come together from around the world to collaborate for a better future.

For the Five by Five Sydney office, it’s an even more auspicious occasion – not because our entire country is surrounded by ocean, but because we had the privilege of working on a campaign that focused on bettering a special part of the ocean: the Great Barrier Reef.

As many marketers know, it can be tough to draw a strong line between a cause and a campaign (and then engage crowdfunding!), but we struck gold when the Good Beer Co approached us to launch their Great Barrier Beer in Australia in 2016.

The Good Beer Co is Australia’s first social enterprise brewing company, giving at least 50% of its profits to good causes. The launch of Great Barrier Beer aimed to raise funds for the Australian Marine Conservation Society and protect the Great Barrier Reef. With a limited budget, we needed to raise awareness and fuel a movement.

We created videos for social media and a crowdfunding site, a PR plan around a launch event in Far North Queensland, POS, social media and a series of promotional hooks. To extend the crowdfunding effort, 3 celebrity chefs were recruited to be ambassadors for a new style of Great Barrier Beer that would be rolled out nationally.

We secured coverage in TV news, radio interviews and articles in some the countries biggest mastheads and online news. The result wasn’t just a lot more beers being consumed (although there were no complaints about that!), but great engagement with the cause raising over $35,000 through crowdfunding.

This year’s action focus for World Oceans Day is preventing plastic pollution and encouraging solutions for a healthy ocean. Wisening up to the cause and to consumers, marketers have created some great campaigns for it.

The video above highlights a campaign in Australia that caught our eye, not just because it combined the inimitable forces of beers & Chris Hemsworth, but for how it turned its very own marketing tagline on its head. Corona and Parley erected a ‘wave of waste’ sculpture in the middle of Melbourne’s Federation Square, made entirely from plastic trash. Behind the sculpture is Chris Hemsworth surfing on a wave with the classic Corona tagline – except this time with a question mark. Because is a wave of waste where you’d really want to be?

Other great campaigns this year include Relais & Chateaux, the French luxury restaurant and hotel group, which has nearly 80 of its members creating individually designed dishes and menus for World Oceans Day. They’ll depict sustainable seafood stylishly, with members including The Little Nell, Hotel Wailea and North Island Resort and SingleThread, Chewton Glen and Saison.

The Central Caribbean Marine Institute is also holding two events to mark World Oceans Day. One of those events will be a broadcast at Camana Bay Cinema in the Cayman Islands, where participants will experience a “live dive” with educators and researchers in Little Cayman CCMI’s program, Reefs Go Live. The broadcast will explore “Can Coral Reefs Be Saved?” and will take the audience on a virtual underwater experience in Little Cayman.

Albeit not a campaign as such just for World Oceans Day, Dee Caffari, the skipper of the Volvo Ocean Race boat, Turn the Tide on Plastic team has also been building momentum over the last 9 months of the race highlighting the current situation in every port they arrive into. Their boat is very recognisable in the fleet for what it stands for and has definitely got the marine world as well as those cities hosting each stopover getting this topic top of their agenda.

As awareness and the call for action grows, campaigns will only get smarter. The big difference with all of this, is there is a very visible measure of success.

Here’s to our oceans!

Image Credits

• Shutterstock

By Eden Radford
Senior Account Manager, AU