Using Advertising to Save Wildlife

Problem: Conservation is short of funds, and adverts are annoying and increasingly skipped.

Solution: Companies sponsor a wildlife national park and create a documentary series about it freely available on their Youtube channel.

This idea is very simple, using the increasing popularity and effectiveness of content marketing to help save wildlife.

Wildlife documentaries are hugely popular, with Planet Earth II watched by about 20% of the UK population and downloaded by 80 million Chinese the day it was released in that country.

Given the popularity of wildlife documentaries, it seems sensible to create such documentaries as content marketing for advertising. Furthermore, research has shown that adverts with animals in them are more effective than those without, so it’s a double win for the companies.

To achieve this, a company would sponsor a national park somewhere in the world, providing the funding for the conservation work to protect, restore and rewild an area that had suffered for years before. In return, they would receive exclusive access to film in the park any day of the year, as well as a huge number of permits to visit the park for their customers.

The company would hire wildlife filmmakers and train local people living around the park to be photographers to offer a bigger source of high-quality footage at a low cost and help alleviate poverty as well.

The filming would tell stories of animals re-introduced into the park and the people that protect them, creating emotionally engaging content people want to watch and providing strong branding for the company that would demonstrate its commitment to protecting the environment.

Television adverts would move away from talking about the company to instead showing a clip of the documentary and pointing viewers to Youtube to see the full story. Also, as the content would be so engaging, people would share it on social media, the mass media would talk about it, and conservation charities would share with their supporters, offering massive sharing potential to increase reach at minimal cost.

The company could continue to sponsor the park for years, sharing stories of the people and animals and the incredible impact of rewilding, so that viewers would build strong emotional connections with those people and animals, and in consequence the perception of the company would be increased, and with it sales as people buy their products and services to support the rewilding and conservation story. The company could also provide exclusive offers to customers to go and visit the park, adding an extra incentive to purchase.

It would be a hugely effective way to protect wildlife, as the budget would be large as it is commercial marketing not a donation, and the company would need to keep wildlife safe to ensure its positive image and association from the park, so the conservation work would be well-financed and highly effective. As the whole project would be funded from the marketing budget, no charitable funding would be needed, and it would create a highly replicable model; indeed, it could get to the point where every big company that wants to succeed with consumers would have to sponsor a park to show their commitment to the environment.