WWF needed to highlight the devastating impact humanity is having on the natural world. But another hard-hitting environmental campaign risked being ignored, avoided or filed away as worthy but difficult. The challenge was to make people care without making them feel overwhelmed.
People do not fall in love with what they are told to protect.
They fall in love with what they are allowed to experience.
So rather than lead with guilt, fear or catastrophe, we could first show people the wonder of the natural world — then reveal, gently but powerfully, what was at stake. We helped create Our Planet, a Netflix and WWF nature documentary that made the environmental crisis impossible to ignore by making the natural world impossible not to love.
At the end of each episode, the experience continued through ourplanet.com, an educational digital platform where people could explore the issues for themselves, discover what was being done, and understand the actions needed to protect and restore nature. Interactive tools like the Explorable Globe showed how the world’s ecosystems are connected, while Voice for the Planet invited people to add their name to a global pledge for climate justice. The platform launched from the World Economic Forum in Davos, with Sir David Attenborough, Al Gore and Jacinda Ardern helping bring the message to the world stage.
In the first three weeks, it drove over 1.5 million visits, 110,000 completed Explorable Globe journeys, 50,500 sign-ups, and 370,000 clicks through to WWF. Instead of asking people to care about a cause, we helped them fall in love with what the cause was fighting for.
