How Your Plastic Diet turned credit cards into constant reminders of the need for change

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How Your Plastic Diet turned credit cards into constant reminders of the need for change

Sustainability is on everyone’s radar – brands, agencies, start-ups and Governments, to name a few. Campaign Brief Asia talks to the Grey Malaysia team about their “Your Plastic Diet” campaign. Over the past two years the campaign has won at Cannes Lions, D&AD, The One Show, AD Stars, Clios, Tangrams and earlier this year a Gold and Silver at Spikes Asia 2022 in the Strategy and Effectiveness Category. We discuss with the agency team what was behind the work and what has made this campaign achieve the level of recognition that it has.

 

1. What served as the campaign’s primary inspiration?
Plastic. It’s the one thing that’s everywhere, and yet we pretend like it isn’t. Nobody’s bothered about the amount of waste it amounts to, even after knowing it doesn’t decompose naturally. Not until we stumbled upon an interesting study which showed how microplastics were found in mussels. Which then got us thinking. If it’s in seafood, certainly the chances of it being it in us humans were high. And it turns out we were right.

2. What was the insight that drove the creative process?
The initial reaction to the fact we are eating plastic was, ‘this is terrifying’. But we needed people to act. And fear-based messaging just makes people turn away – so we need the campaign to be shocking, but factual. Once we figured out how much plastic humans consumed on average, we needed to visualize it in such a way that anyone in any country could instantly comprehend it. It started off as an iPad worth of plastic a year, but that was too high brow. Then we broke it down further; a plastic bucket every quarter, a hanger a month… until we got down to a credit card a week. Everyone’s got a plastic card of some sort in their pocket; with this single message, we turned the billions of credit cards in people’s pockets into a constant reminder of the need for change.

3. How did you go about the film-making process?
This might be hard to believe, but the entire offline shot was done by an art director and copywriter in a tiny studio owned by this eclectic Korean photographer. But thanks to mFx studios and the magic they pulled off, you get the lovely final product you see.

4. How did the media respond to the campaign?
It became a hot topic, worldwide. From the local news to major newspapers to CNN, BBC and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, this simple message of ‘you eat a credit card a week’ was so shocking and unusual it became a headline story everywhere. And that was the intended result, to make a shocking statement and compel people into to sign our pledge.

5. Has there been significant progress in the fight against plastic since the campaign film aired in 2019?
Yes, there has been. Three years ago, WWF tasked us with helping them gain enough public action to enable them to lobby global governments for a Globally Binding Treaty on Plastics. Earlier this year, on March 3rd 2022, that mandate was passed by all member states of UNEA in ‘A Historic Day in the Campaign to Beat Plastic Pollution’.

VIEW THE YOUR PLASTIC DIET CASE FILM

Pictured above right to left: Thang Wei Heng (Dpty Exec. Creative Director), Irene Wong (CEO Grey Malaysia), Graham Drew (CCO), Andrew Fong (Creative Director) and Selva Ganapathy (Senior Copywriter)

How Your Plastic Diet turned credit cards into constant reminders of the need for change How Your Plastic Diet turned credit cards into constant reminders of the need for change How Your Plastic Diet turned credit cards into constant reminders of the need for change