A simple idea strong enough to travel the world despite a tiny budget. This campaign achieved a significant change in behaviour by fundamentally changing the way people view poorly managed lawns. Instead of an embarrassment, dry lawns are now a sign of environmental consciousness and water conservation.
Gotland’s Ugliest Lawn marked a new direction for sustainability-messaging, using humour instead of lecturing. It showed that sustainable living doesn’t have to equal a lesser version of the lives we are used to – opening up to more effective sustainability communication. And that is exactly what is needed to accelerate the sustainable transition.
List the results
Gotland’s Ugliest Lawn and the water shortage issue became a universal discussion. The campaign had a potential reach of 788 million people. The winner was interviewed by BBC Newsday, and CBC radio interviewed our client. The campaign was praised and spread by media outlets like The BBC Global News Podcast, The Guardian and The Washington Post.
The campaign generated high reader engagement on major global and local media outlets. Comments on social media and news articles urged their local communities to launch similar water saving competitions.
The business objective of saving water was reached and exceeded. Water consumption on Gotland decreased with 5% compared to the previous summer. On September 1 the irrigation ban on Gotland was lifted. Traffic to Gotland’s website gotland.com increased by 21% (an increase with 41,947 unique visitors) compared to the same period the year before. Gotland showed the world that sustainable action can be fun.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) praised the campaign in a report on Swedish sustainability policies:
"An innovative competition for the ugliest lawn helped to reduce water consumption and inspired a debate about water use outside Sweden's borders due to international media coverage."
Multiple regions in Sweden started a local ugly lawn competitions in 2023 to save water, as well as municipalities in Canada. A radio station got its listeners to share images of their ugly lawns on their Facebook page. And Region Gotland was invited to a sustainability conference hosted by the European Union to tell member states how we made sustainability communication fun and effective.
Background
Situation
Gotland is a region in Sweden. The overall goal of the Gotland place brand is to attract tourists and inspire people to relocate permanently. This campaign was about getting people to save precious groundwater. Due to the extremely tight budget, we had to find a way to make the campaign fun to share and easy for the media to pick up.
Brief
The brief was to come up with an activity to make residents and visitors aware of Gotland's acute water shortage and get them to use water more sparingly during the critical summer months. The campaign needed to be inspiring and have the potential to go viral.
Objectives
The objectives were to create a broad commitment to the water issue and lower the water usage on Gotland. A secondary objective was to generate traffic to gotland.com.
Describe the creative idea
The creative idea was to launch a competition that celebrates the driest, brownest lawns on Gotland and by that make it fun and share-worthy to save water. By inspiring people to not water their lawns we wanted to influence a broader audience to conserve water in other everyday situations like showering or doing dishes.
Scalability
Since it only takes a change of mind to not water your lawn during drought, the potential for scalability is enormous.
Industry impact
In a world where most sustainability communication paints gloomy future scenarios, this campaign made sustainability fun. The light and engaging approach was welcomed by the green community and saluted by BBC Newsday, The Washington Post, The Guardian and sustainability-media like EcoWatch, Treehugger, Green Matters and EcoTopical.
Describe the strategy
Gotland has experienced record low groundwater levels for several years. The spring of 2022 offered unusually little rainfall, resulting in even lower groundwater levels. We looked for an idea that would not only highlight the problem, but in it self offered a solution.
Our breakthrough moment occurred when we realised that many house owners watered their lawns despite the water shortage, just to maintain the status, or norm, of a green lawn. What if we could challenge this norm by flipping the perspectives and celebrating climate-conscious, dry lawns instead of the water-consuming green ones?
We saw an opportunity to inspire people to conserve water in everyday situations by addressing the absurdity in watering lawns during a drought.
There was a challenge to get people to hear about our campaign with almost no media budget, but we established contact with local media that resulted in articles, radio interviews and TV-coverage.
Describe the execution
The competition was launched with 8 Instagram posts triggering lawn owners on Gotland to share images of their ugly dry lawns. We worked directly towards media to get them to write about the water shortage and our competition. The campaign became the talk of the island.
During the competition we worked actively to get local press to cover the water issue and the progress of the competition. Nationwide media attention peaked as the winner was announced in August.
When the campaign had become a national viral success we contacted leading international media and journalists covering sustainability issues. We provided them with material for articles.
During the global drought international media was flooded with negative climate news. We saw an opportunity to be an inspiring voice presenting a solution to water shortage.
List the results
Gotland’s Ugliest Lawn and the water shortage issue became a universal discussion. The campaign had a potential reach of 788 million people. The winner was interviewed by BBC Newsday, and CBC radio interviewed our client. The campaign was praised and spread by media outlets like The BBC Global News Podcast, The Guardian and The Washington Post.
The campaign generated high reader engagement on major global and local media outlets. Comments on social media and news articles urged their local communities to launch similar water saving competitions.
The business objective of saving water was reached and exceeded. Water consumption on Gotland decreased with 5% compared to the previous summer. On September 1 the irrigation ban on Gotland was lifted. Traffic to Gotland’s website gotland.com increased by 21% (an increase with 41,947 unique visitors) compared to the same period the year before. Gotland showed the world that sustainable action can be fun.
