Ogilvy & Mather Chicago created a lovely award show case study campaign for Interface: the world's largest modular carpet manufacturer.
Interface didn't just want to highlight the fact that half the world's coral reefs are dead or dying. They wanted to do something about it. So they created awareness, but dumping 7,000 pounds of fishing nets on Chicago's Oak Street beach to show people how bad the problem really is.
Thankfully the solution is to encourage developing countries to gather up their used fishing nets and ship them to Interface so they can repurpose them into carpeting.
By the way, the case study calls Oak Street a beautiful beach. I guess they mean that in an ironic way. According to Switchboard, the Natural Resources Defense Council Staff Blog, beaches in many of Chicago's neighborhoods have bacteria in the water far exceeding federal safety standards. And as little as four years ago, Lake Michigan had an asbestos problem.
Point being, while it's great that Interface is helping to clean up the environment in far away places, Ogilvy might have come up with a less potentially destructive way to create awareness in its own backyard.
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