TREESPOND - a creative campaign by Treepex has been launched on July 29, 2018. The campaign invites people from all over the world to respond to ignorance of a climate change problem in an extraordinary way. The main antagonist of the campaign is Donald j. Trump, who is one of the biggest climate problem denier from the highest media stage. On a specially created web-platform - www.TREESPOND.com people can find each and every quote about environmental issues delivered by Trump. Each quote is evaluated with an ignorance scale (specially created for the project). The more ignorant the phrase is, the more trees are needed to be planted to eliminate the quote. People can also invite their friends to eliminate the quotes faster. As soon as the quote is “Treesponded”, in partnership with American Forestry Association, certain amount of trees are planted across the national forests of California recently devastated by wildfire.
The contributors will receive a special certificate for the trees they planted and regular photo updates to monitor the progress.
Tell us about your role in the creation of this work.
I’m an Executive Creative Director I’ve been involved in the project from the phase of generating ideas, till clicking the enter button to launch the campaign. My name is Beqa Meparishvili.
Give us an overview of the campaign, what is it about?
The idea of the campaign is quite simple. We’ve build a story with a great cause and a great villain. As you may know Donald J. Trump is one of the biggest climate change denier and he tweets a lot about this issue. His quotes frustrate environmental activists, makes them angry but mostly makes them laugh. So we wondered, what if we create a platform, where people can respond to these tweets in an unexpected way, what if we let the audience plant trees every time Trump tweets something ignorant about climate change.
Tell us about the details creative brief, what did it ask?
The main objective for us was to build what we call “green community” around OXYN – a block chain ecosystem for those who care about environment.
Which insight led to the creation of this piece of work?
As it often happens, the problem led us to the solution itself. Everyone talks about environmental issues but finally not as much people take real actions. This problem is not in our everyday life and it’s hard to unite people against the problem which is not visible, not tenable, unless you connect it with something that is.
How did the client initially react to this idea?
It’s going to be viral - they said, it’s going to be cheap - they said. Usually when you present a provocative idea like this, the client gets scared. The risks are too high. This was not the case. To have a big publicity with a limited budget you need to be brave and our client realized that right away. Plus we have a good history and it means a lot.
What was the greatest challenge that you and your team faced during development.
A long distance relationship. The main challenge for us was to manage the process from Georgia, the country (our HQ) in USA. It’s always hard to operate on a different market.
What did you enjoy most about seeing this campaign through? Did you learn anything new from the experience?
The whole process was great, we had a lot of fun. But the most exciting moments were when we realized that we’ve created a story which media giants like Mashable, The Independent and Huffpost wanted to tell for free.
Where do you see this campaign going in the future?
I see it optimistically – at least 10 million trees planted in Sierra region, recently devastated by wildfire.