Eco Terrorism vs Vinnie Jones and Porn: Which Would You Rather Watch?
Thursday, January 26th, 2012 | Our Philosophy | No Comments
Kudos to the British Heart Foundation for their Hard and Fast video campaign starring Vinnie Jones.
Aimed at educating the general public on the best way to perform CPR, the video sends up Jones’ typecast gangster persona by making a Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels spoof in which the former footballer – flanked by two blokes who look like they’re appearing in the video in order to fund their way through Bouncer School – resuscitates a ‘geezer’ using only his hands because “you only kiss your Missus on the lips”…
The campaign went viral, racking up more than a million views on YouTube and earning a string of press coverage. By embracing celebrity culture, keeping the message simple and adding a twist of humour into the mix (the soundtrack for the video is the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive), the British Heart Foundation unlocked a mass audience for a message that without the help of Jones and his burly companions could have been pretty worthy and dull.
Compare and contrast with some of the eco movement’s attempts to engage a mass audience. Treehugger website recently hailed the fact that five ‘eco movies’ have been shortlisted in the Best Documentary category for this year’s Oscars as a sign of the subject’s rising popularity. Those films are: If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (a tale about eco terrorists), Battle for Brooklyn, Jane’s Journey, Semper Fi: Always Faithful, and Project Nim. How many have you seen? How many of them have you even heard of? Thought not…
At the time of writing the You ube trailers for those movies have a total of 82,046 views between them. That’s more than 10 times less than what Vinnie managed on his own. Where the British Heart Foundation was brave enough to put its tongue firmly in its cheek to communicate an important message, too many in the green movement lack the boldness to make content that might appeal to people who have different interests to them (i.e. things other than climate change).
PETA, the US-based campaign for the ethical treatment of animals, has a history of taking a more populist approach to getting their message across. Much like Global Cool, the climate change campaign I work for, PETA has used celebrity association to engage the mainstream with their work. Their latest campaign will see them take their message into the world of pornography with the launch of a new .xxx domain version of their website. Users of the site will be forced to watch an animal being skinned before they get to see a celebrity in the buff.
Whether anyone will still be in the, er, ‘mood’ for doing whatever it is that they do while looking at naked ladies on the internet (I couldn’t possibly comment) once they’ve seen an animal being liberated of its fur is up for debate. It’s unlikely to win PETA any Oscars, that’s for sure. But common consensus (and a load of search data from Google, no doubt) certainly suggests that the potential audience for PETA’s message is significantly higher in the porn world than it is in the eco documentary world.
Eco terrorists and those who make documentaries about them should take note.
Solving climate change the Steve Jobs way
Thursday, January 5th, 2012 | Our Philosophy | No Comments
This post was originally published in the Huffington Post
Apple is hardly a beacon of environmental good practice, but that doesn’t mean Steve Jobs didn’t play his part in helping to find a solution to climate change.
Climate change does not have an awareness problem. It does, however, have a marketing problem. Plenty has been done to raise awareness, but very little has been done to effectively market green solutions to the general public.
Of course, the climate change problem is very simple to sum up: the human race is producing more and more carbon dioxide, therefore global temperatures are rising, therefore the earth will eventually no longer be a place that human beings are able to exist in. In a nutshell: “Hello dinosaurs and dodos, nice to meet you, we’re the human race!”
It’s the simplicity of this message that seems to make it the default when people try and talk to the public about sustainability.
The actions that individuals can take to help combat climate change are so much more difficult to summarise. This is because the behaviours that are causing us to produce too much carbon dioxide are wide ranging. Just think about all the ways you could waste energy in your home: washing clothes at unnecessarily high temperatures, sitting around in shorts and t-shirt with the heating pumping out to the max, re-boiling the kettle because you forgot to make your brew the first time it boiled. The list goes on, and that’s before you’ve even put a foot outside your front door.
There is no one-size-fits-all way to discourage humans from behaving in these ways. In some cases, the free market, driven by the profit motive, can provide a way for the public to consume products in a less wasteful way. The iPod is a great example of this. By creating this product, Steve Jobs and Apple vastly reduced the demand for CDs, the plastic cases that they come in and the transportation that is required to take them to the shops.
Of course, product innovations such as the iPod won’t always be the answer. For other behaviours, it’s necessary to motivate the public to consume less, not just differently.
For some people, appeals to thrift might work. In these times of economic turmoil and rising energy prices, the financial motive for energy efficient homes has never been stronger. But when it comes to behaviour change, the solution is rarely as one-dimensional as that. Not everyone is motivated in the same way, and therefore not everyone cares about financial prudence.
Similarly, not everyone is equally empowered to change their behaviour. So reinsulating the loft to save money might float a homeowner’s boat, but someone living in rented accommodation is less likely to know how their heating system works, or feel able to do much about it. They might, however, be persuaded to turn down their heating to a lower temperature if they can be convinced that having it too hot is drying out their skin and making them age prematurely (which it is).
The possible solutions to high-carbon behaviours are almost endless, but what almost all of them have in common is that they do not require the consumer to understand the problem they are helping to solve – just as people who bought the iPod probably did not know (or care) that they were reducing the demand for CDs.
The person who puts on a jumper so they can turn down their heating and protect their skin does not need to know how much CO2 they have saved – nor does the person who ditches the car for the bike because they want to be fitter, or the person who takes canvas bags to the supermarket because they have cooler designs and are more comfortable on the fingers than plastic ones.
Whether knowingly or not, Steve Jobs made us all accidental environmentalists, but that was never part of the marketing strategy. We all bought iPods because they were more convenient, beautifully designed and – crucially – because Apple managed to convince us that we would be happier with one than without.
We need to find more green solutions like this for a whole range of behaviours. This presents a much greater creative challenge than simply talking about melting ice caps, carbon calculators or slapping an “eco” label on something. It’s time for us all to take inspiration from Steve Jobs and step up to this creative challenge.
Image via philozopher
What Climate Change Campaigns Could (and Should) Learn From Jay-Z
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011 | Our Philosophy | No Comments
New York – so good they named it twice. Everyone wants to be a part of it, right? But where does that reputation come from? What is it about the Big Apple that makes it one of the coolest cities on the planet?
In the search for answers I consulted the US Census Bureau, where I discovered that the population of New York is 8,214,426 (as of 2006), the median household income is $38,293 and 31.3% of businesses in the city are owned by women. I also looked at The Economist, where I found articles about increasing hunger and poverty in the city, as well as an under-performing and under-funded public school system.
Pretty uninspiring stuff on the whole. Of course, the real answer to my question lies in the very first sentence of this article. New York’s popular perception has nothing to do with facts and figures and has everything to do with its portrayal in popular culture. From Frank Sinatra to Jay-Z, the Big Apple has long been sold as a dream factory.
The climate change movement could learn a lot from this. The public have long been bombarded with facts and figures about global warming – most notably in Al Gore’s climate change movie An Inconvenient Truth – in attempt to spur them into action. But as New York demonstrates, facts and figures rarely capture the public’s imagination.
Let’s look at the lyrics on Jay-Z’s massive hit record Empire State of Mind, on which New York is described as:
“A concrete jungle where dreams are made,
There’s nothing you can’t do now you’re in New York,
These streets will make you feel brand new,
Big lights will inspire you.”
Powerful stuff. And yet it doesn’t contain a single verifiable fact or figure. Contrast this with Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, during which the former US Vice President uses a series of graphs and pie charts about melting ice caps and rising temperatures to paint an apocalyptic vision of the earth’s future.
If you’re the type of person who reads The Economist, Gore’s Powerpoint presentation was probably right up your street. You may even have made a conscious decision to do something about climate change as a result of seeing the film. The problem is that most people don’t read The Economist. Most people watch the X Factor, and read Heat magazine, and worry about whether they’ll be able to fit into their bikini on their next holiday.
Market segmentation experts Cultural Dynamics call these people ‘Outer Directed’. They’re motivated by money, success, looking good and getting approval from others. They also find science scary and don’t like being told what to do. For this reason, pretty much every attempt the climate change movement has made to engage them has failed. Since Gore’s film came out in 2006, belief in climate change has actually declined according to this survey.
These ‘Outer Directed’ people need to be inspired to do things, and that includes taking on action on climate change. Jay-Z’s song is a great example of how inspirational language and tone of voice can make something incredibly appealing and attractive. Gore’s approach is the exact opposite and only serves to make the whole issue frightening, unattractive and boring.
There is a time and a place for scientific debate about climate change, and for serious initiatives led by both government and big business to help tackle it, just as there is an important role for the type of journalism produced by The Economist, and the kind of data produced by the US Census Bureau. But if the climate change movement is ever to break through to the mainstream and persuade the masses to change their ways, it needs fewer statistics and a little bit more stardust, New York style.
Measuring climate change campaigns: What’s the relation between online and offline behaviour?
Monday, September 12th, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
At Global Cool we have rigorously measured our climate change campaigns and published the results in detail here.
We also measure our online campaigning activity in great detail, which provides a gold mine of data about how many people we can reach, where and how we can reach them and - perhaps most interestingly for us as an organisation trying to persuade people to change their behaviour – how deeply they do or don’t engage with our ideas.
But, whilst all this online data is great in terms of helping us understand how best to communicate with our target audience, it doesn’t really tell us very much about how our audience behaves in ‘the real world’ once they have interacted with us online. (N.B. Our digital activity has focused on engaging and educating the public with specific actions, rather than building tools that might, for example, measure an individual’s carbon footprint, which we think would exclude the very audience we’re trying to reach.)
To some extent, the surveys and focus groups we do can tell us whether our campaigning is actually changing people’s behaviour, and we have seen some positive results, for example the number of people who said they would wear woolly jumpers at home rose from 12% to 18% following our Turn Up The Style, Turn Down The Heat campaign. Nevertheless, it is still useful to see other evidence that online engagement is an effective way of persuading people to change their behaviour.
Therefore we were pleased to liaise with Michele Mazza from Imperial College recently, who has done some excellent work into the relation between online and offline behaviour. Essentially what we wanted to know from Michele was: If someone likes us on Facebook, or retweets us on Twitter, or signs up for our newsletter, does this mean they will then go on to adopt the behaviours that we are promoting? Michele reported back as follows:
Assessing whether individuals online engagement with organisations influences offline behaviour has proven a very interesting but particularly challenging aspect to evaluate.
While in the case of private sector this issue is less problematic, since the sale of a product can be seen as a ‘primer’ to measure the effectiveness of an online campaign, for public and NGO’s organisation the task is trickier.
However recent studies by Cugelman (Cugelman et al. (2009), (2010)) involving meta-analytical techniques used to assess the impact of online interventions in influencing individual’s offline behaviours, depict a positive picture.
Cugelman first distinguishes between Macro-behaviours, described as primary behaviours targeted by an online intervention; and micro-behaviours describes as routine behaviours that people perform online, intended to lead to the macro-behaviour. For example, a micro-behaviour would describe when a person registered for a weight-loss intervention, while the macro-behaviour would be dieting.
He demonstrates how Microsuasion, i.e. small persuasive tactics used to encourage the performance of minor online tasks, such as signing up for a newsletter or clicking on a hyperlink (Fogg, 2003), are very effective in driving micro-behaviour change. More importantly he also founds correlation between micro and macro-behaviour change, since ” online behaviour outcomes can be seen as a process that includes a small number of online activities leading to significant impacts later on” Cugelman (2010).
This is particularly true when the number of online features in an intervention, i.e. the number of micro-behaviour to perform, is high. (Vandelanotte, et al., 2007). Add to this in another study (Cugelman et al., 2009) Cugelman suggests how the web site credibility, in terms of expertise, trustworthiness and visual appeal is also a key component in effectiveness of online behavioural change interventions.
Finally he also shows how online interventions can match and sometimes outperform interventions distributed over traditional media.
Of course these studies do not fully solve the problem of being able to isolate the effects of Global Cool online activity from the myriad of other influences on people’s ‘green’ behaviour. But they demonstrate how online micro-suasion can lead to micro-behaviour change and how many micro-behaviour changes can lead to macro-behaviour ones.
So they can be seen as a further justification of your approach, and are good selling points!
Many thanks to Michele for this useful research, which would seem to reinforce our approach to online climate change campaigning. We’d be interested to hear from other organisations on their views about the relationship between online and offline behaviour in the comments…
Global Cool: A case study in Values Mode campaigning
Thursday, September 8th, 2011 | Our Philosophy | 3 Comments
There is disagreement between many within the environmental movement over how best to engage the public with climate change and, in particular, how to persuade them to make green behaviour choices. A recent report by advocates of the Common Cause approach attempted to discredit the Values Mode approach, which is advocated by Chris Rose and Pat Dade (both members of our advisory committee) and used by Global Cool as the basis for our theory of change.
As implementers of the Values Mode approach, rather than its architects, it is not our place to address the specific concerns raised within the report – called Limitations of Environmental Campaigning Based on Values for Money, Image and Status. Nevertheless, we did feel it was worth presenting an actual real-world case study of Values Mode campaigning in action as a reminder of how it can – and does – work.
Global Cool has been using the Values Mode campaigning approach for three years. Our goal is to persuade the public to make more green lifestyle choices in order to reduce their carbon emissions. We target the values mode known as ‘Now People’, who are generally fashion-conscious trendsetters motivated by status, success, wealth, looking good and having a good time. ‘Now People’ represent a significant proportion of the population and therefore the environmental movement cannot succeed without engaging them – which it has largely failed to do so far.
Global Cool has created innovative climate change campaigns and content that promote green behaviour without alienating ‘Now People’. We have done this by:
- Focusing on the benefits of green behaviours; making them fun and positive: ‘Now People’ don’t like being told what to do, nor do they respond to data-driven reasoning. The Al Gore approach to communicating climate change issues could not be more alienating for a Now Person.
- Using relevant language and tone of voice: Global Cool does not talk about data or science. In fact, we avoid the words ‘climate change’, ‘global warming’ and ‘carbon emissions’ at all costs. Instead we focus on promoting specific green behaviours.
- Associating green behaviours with subjects they are interested in: We use fashion, music, celebrity, travel and other topics ‘Now People’ are interested in to promote green behaviours.
- Offering practical solutions: ‘Now People’ are aware that climate change is a problem but they don’t know what they can do about it. They feel alienated by most climate change comms. Global Cool makes green behaviours easy as well as fun.
Has it worked?
Our impact data suggests we are persuading people to change their behaviour: after our home energy campaign in 2010 the number of people who said they would consider wearing trendy knitwear in order to turn their heating down increased from 12% to 18%. Our research also shows that we are reaching the right people. In fact, 80% of our audience were identified as being ‘outer directed’ (the broader values mode group that includes ‘Now People’). And that we’re continuing to grow too: our online reach has increased from 37,000 to 77,000 per month, with around 10% demonstrating engagement with our ideas.
We hope that our approach demonstrates that it is possible to create consumer-facing comms that effectively use the values mode approach to deliver green messaging and, more importantly, to influence people’s behaviour in order to reduce carbon emissions. Nevertheless, we are interested to know your thoughts on our approach and ideas for improving it…
Using music, celebrities and books to promote public transport
Monday, July 4th, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
Personal car travel accounts for over 25% of the average Brit’s carbon footprint. Global Cool’s Do It In Public campaign taps into our audience’s interests in music, being social and having fun to promote public transport as an alternative to driving. The campaign focuses on the adventures you can have on buses and trains as well as the ‘me-time public’ transport gives you to read, relax, listen to music, chat to friends or meet someone new!
Throughout 2009 and 2010 Global Cool attended music festivals up and down the country to talk to bands and artists about their adventures and ‘me-time’ on public transport. All the films were distributed online and continue to be published weekly revealing new top celeb stories. To connect directly with festival goers in 2009, we took the Global Cool Bus on-site and also worked with Vice Magazine to create an insert booklet full of musicians’ stories of public transport journeys. In 2010 our campaign focused on the ‘me-time’ that travelling by public transport affords to read, relax and meet new people. Global Cool launched a book club on Twitter that encouraged people to catch up on the latest releases while on the move.
This year we are using Spotify to create the ultimate playlists for every major music festival this summer. On the website for each festival we have published travel guides, links to the playlists and a travel light tip to help make Doing It In Public on the way to a festival as fun as possible for our readers. Global Cool have collaborated with Fairshare Music, to create weekly Music In Public top 10 lists available for download. We have also continued our Books In Public segment on the website with weekly book recommendations and reviews.
What do you think about our Do It In Public campaign?
Using music festivals to promote Traincations
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
Air travel represents 10% of an average Brit’s carbon footprint. Global Cool encourages our audience to consider a flight-free holiday when planning their next short break. We created the Traincation as a hot travel trend and showcased it by taking celebrities to Barcelona, Amsterdam and Munich – exciting destinations that Brits wouldn’t think to reach by train. We filmed our celebrities’ experiences to show our audience that Traincations are a fun and easy alternative to flying.
The celebrity Traincations really caught the imagination of the media. Stories and video appeared in print and online in The Sun, News of the World, Hello, Company magazine and Now Magazine. We used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to run competitions, talk about the campaign and establish the trend. In fact there were over 132 million opportunities for the public to see the campaign messages.
The campaign positions holidaying by train as aspirational, fun and exciting. The weekly articles not only demonstrate the range of exciting destinations that can be reached by train from the UK but also showed how the train journey can become part of the holiday.
As part of our Traincation campaign this summer, we recently ran a competition to win tickets to Gurten Festival in Bern, Switzerland. The prize also includes train travel to the festival courtesy of Rail Europe, TVG Lyria and Eurostar. Entrants told us – on the Global Cool Facebook page – which artist and song they would like to hear on Traincation and then votes were cast for the best suggestions.
All in all we had 130 entries and the campaign generated a 50 per cent rise in people viewing our Traincation content on Facebook and a similar rise in visits to our website.
What do you think of our Traincation campaign?
How we measure web activity and define online success
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
Our most recent web statistics have shown yet more impressive growth since our last update. Highlights from May’s results included:
- Most ever number of monthly unique users on globalcool.org
- Most ever monthly page views
- Highest number of repeat visitors
- Highest percentage of people opening our newsletter
- Most number of interactions on the website, Facebook and Twitter
Global Cool’s online activity has three main channels: the Global Cool website, our weekly newsletter and social media activity (mainly on Facebook, Twitter and You Tube, but also increasingly on Flickr and Four Square). In each of these channels we measure the reach of our activity and also the depth of affinity and engagement with our message.
As a campaigning organisation seeking to change the general public’s behaviour by making green lifestyles more attractive, clearly it’s important for us to communicate with as many people as possible, as frequently as possible. However, we also recognise the importance of monitoring how people respond to our messages.
Reach is relatively straightforward to measure: how many people visited the website, how many people opened the newsletter, how many followers do we have on Twitter etc etc. Affinity and engagement measures are more complicated and nuanced. Deciding what type user behaviour demonstrates affinity with your message and what demonstrates engagement is not an exact science. Some examples of affinity we measure include repeat visitors to the website, searches for our brand name, opens of our newsletter etc. Examples of engagement include commenting on a blog post, entering a competition or a retweet on Twitter.
It’s also worth noting that affinity and engagement measures will not always be positive. Some comments, tweets, Facebook messages will be from people telling you you’re doing it wrong, or that they hate you. Some people might view several pages on your website because they are so outraged by how dumb they think your article was that they want to make sure the rest of your content is just as disagreeable to their particular sensibilities.
In terms of the former, we do take a measure of how much negative feedback we get and it regularly comes at less than 0.5% of our total audience. The highest it’s ever been in a single month is 1%. For the latter it’s difficult to ever know what motivates someone to look at two, three, four pages on your site. However, given the tiny amount of negative engagement we get, we are willing to take a leap of faith and assume the vast majority of affinity-like behaviour we see is also motivated by positive rather than negative sentiment.
All in all, Global Cool is now reaching in excess of 70,000 people per month across all three of our main web channels. Of those people, around 22% are demonstrating affinity with our message and 11% are engaging with us.
We are keen to know how you measure your online activity and how you define your success indicators, particularly if, like Global Cool you are seeking to encourage behaviour change or promote green living. Feel free to leave us a comment below…
How to encourage green behaviour
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 | Our Philosophy | No Comments
There was an interesting and thought-provoking piece in Green Futures last week about changing people’s behaviour in order to prevent climate change, rather than simply raising awareness – as we’ve said many times before, climate change does not have an awareness problem, it has a marketing problem.
The piece describes behaviour change as “the holy grail” of sustainability. We would wholeheartedly agree with that, which is why Global Cool focuses its campaigns on getting people to make green lifestyle choices based on things that motivate them – mainly celebrity, sex, looking and feeling great.
Global Cool’s Executive Director, Caroline Fiennes, is quoted in the piece. You can read it in full here.
Do you agree or disagree? We’d love to know why so let us know in the comments box below…
A lesson from Tom Cruise on promoting green via the power of film
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011 | Global Cool | No Comments
The Global Cool Foundation are now working with the British Independent Film Awards (BIFA) to encourage the placement of green behaviours in films. Placing these behaviours in films is an attractive prospect for Global Cool as it normalises the actions (or products) for the viewer.
Getting people to change their behaviour to reduce carbon emissions is the aim, not getting them to be interested in climate change.
An example of this sort of placement is the use of BMW’s chic new i8 plug-in hybrid in the new Mission Impossible film. Tom Cruise will use the electric hybrid car in the new film, The Ghost Protocol.
Behaviour placement is particularly effective in action films like the Mission Impossible series as cars are an important part of the film and, so it’s very positive that this film will be promoting an eco-friendly vehicle.
Using an inflential, sexy actor like Tom Cruise also promotes the use of green products and behaviours as “normal”.
Innovative Green Lifestyle Content
Global Cool Foundation runs the Global Cool campaign, an online green lifestyle magazine. Our innovative approach to creating green lifestyle content has redefined how to communicate sustainable behaviour. The site regularly attracts over 30,000 unique users per month - visit GlobalCool.org, like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter or watch our You Tube videos.
From Our Blog: How To Make Green Mainstream
Don’t Just Take Our Word For It…
"This is a fantastic organisation working to help people find ways to save energy and be greener without sacrificing the things they enjoy." - Boris Johnson, Mayor of London
"Global Cool does a great job" - Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Labour Party and former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
"I need guidance. I really want to do well, but I honestly don't know how to do well unless somebody tells me.... and that's where Global Cool has a future" - Stephen Fry, British Actor
Follow Us