Earth Day: Big Ideas to Save the Planet

When it comes to sustainability and the environment, the advertising industry is often accused of greenwashing, and with good reason. We’ve all seen brands engage with green-coded imagery and publicity stunts with little sincerity behind the scenes. However, that’s just half the story - when working with charities and NGOs, not to mention businesses committed to sustainable transformation, the industry has deployed a great deal of creativity.

This Earth Day, we’re bringing together some of the campaigns and creative transformations that have stuck with us over the years. Whether it’s poignant awareness-raising campaigns, ingenious, transformative ideas or behaviour-changing interventions, all the work in this collection is designed to get you in the right headspace.

As a reflection of the growing awareness of the escalating climate crisis, many of the works we’ve shared are more recent. From 2021’s Doconomy, a countdown to 2030 to the likes of The First Digital Nation, a major project that highlights how rising sea levels are threatening the very existence of the nation of Tuvalu there are some inspiring pieces of work from the 2020s. However there are also some ideas that, looking back on them, were possibly ahead of their time in terms of engaging with technology and finding non-traditional solutions. For example, 2010’s ‘Save as .WWF’ from Jung von Matt saw the agency invent a whole new light file type to combat our rising digital carbon footprint.

There’s also plenty of striking storytelling from Greenpeace and WWF that demonstrates just how important it is to touch hearts in order to change minds and behaviours.

Check out the work here - and let us know if there are any big, planet-saving ideas from years past that you think deserve a place in our Earth Day collection by contacting max [at]lbbonline.com.