Britain’s youth are being enticed into connecting with the great outdoors and tackle one of the root causes the spiralling mental health crisis and eco-anxiety through a new five-pronged campaign designed to take consumers on a trip back to the wild.
The campaign is being launched in response to a creative brief set by the first-of-its-kind Agency for Nature, developed by climate and creativity non-profits Glimpse and Purpose Disruptors.
It follows a study which shows Britain ranks bottom for “nature connectedness” in Europe, and UK consumers measured lowest for their feeling of “oneness with the natural world”. And yet a recent poll from the Agency For Nature conducted by YouGov shows 77% of people ages 18 to 35 would like to be more connected to nature.
To tackle this, five UK creative agencies seconded rising talent to the Agency for Nature – Weiden + Kennedy, The & Partnership, Amplify, Leo Burnett and Oliver. They were tasked with “creating hype for a nature-connected lifestyle”, as part of a provocative brief where “nature” is the client.
Leo Burnett’s “Girls Just Wanna Grow Plants” uses high-fashion photography to promote nature to touch a nerve with the target audience; W+K ignites the interest of the gaming community in real-world gardening through the “Seed Saga” campaign; Amplify’s “The Slow Brew” transformed people’s coffee breaks into a mini urban nature experience; and The & Partnership’s ‘Ecokamasutra’ is designed to rekindle the romance between nature-shy Brits and the fertile outdoors.
Meanwhile, Oliver’s “Nature’s a Trip” features a hypnotic psychedelic billboard and social campaign, bringing to life the transformative, meditative and awe-inspiring benefits of nature – our ultimate medicine.
Creative design director Mark Betteridge and senior copywriter Susie Cornelius, who devised the activity, said: “Having researched the NHS move to start prescribing outdoor activities for different health issues, peoples instinctive reaction to medicate rather than meditate, and the innate connection we have with natural patterns like plant fractals, we landed on the idea that nature’s the original trip – bringing a joy and wonder that both makes you feel good and does you good too.
“The idea started as an OOH static, but quickly became a motion built DOOH, and social video really tell the story of the amazing psychological benefits of being in nature.
“We hope [this project] inspires other creatives to tell their own stories of how we can bring people of all ages in the UK back into nature.”
The Agency for Nature will be a long-standing initiative to build a public mandate for nature connection and protection. Campaigns will contribute to an open-source creative library for nature and climate communicators, demonstrating the power of novel climate communication approaches.
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