Objectives

Brand Awareness & Community Engagement

• As a nonprofit, brand awareness and community engagement are incredibly important to achieving our global strategy, so for this campaign, we aimed to make shareable content that would spark conversations within our community of animal activists, but also increase our brand awareness outside of animal activism through these shares.

Social Impact

• Now, more than ever, we need to rethink the relationship we have with the animals who share this planet with us. We’re all imperiled by climate change, and we humans are all contributing toward that deepening peril, either through our inescapable use of fossil fuels, or by eating foods produced through vast industrial animal farming operations. Yet each of us can also have an impact toward change - both individual and systemic – but that impact can only first begin through awareness. World Animal Protection US, founded through disaster rescue work specifically for animals, has seen first-hand the impact the climate crisis has had on wildlife—often the forgotten victims of changing climate-fueled disasters such as the ever-worsening wildfires in Australia, Canada, California, and the Mediterranean, as well as the devastation from increasingly stronger and more frequent hurricanes, floods, and worsening drought. We wanted to make these issues the center of our social media on Earth Day.

Strategy and Execution

Earth Day is a time when countless people around the world pause to reflect on the state of our planet and the mounting threats posed by climate change. Yet many think of the dangers either in the abstract, or in terms of the potential impact on their own daily lives in particular: their homes, hometowns, and immediate environment. We wanted to jolt people to reflect on the perils facing the animals of the world – not as abstractions, but as individuals. Animals, after all, are all at our mercy, and have no power to alter the course of the future we are creating for them. We wanted to showcase snapshots of possible futures, and ask people to reflect both on their role in them and on their very real power to change the future, asking: Which World Will You Leave Them?

For maximum impact, we wanted the images to feel emotional, evocative, haunting, and photorealistic— but we did not want to utilize photographs of actual animals in distress, transposing real-life suffering to an imagined setting. To accomplish our goal, and to also ensure a thematically and visually unified set of images, we decided to use an image-generative AI to visualize our desired scenes. Using AI for this task also felt uniquely appropriate thematically: nothing in an AI-generated image exists in real life –and neither does the future we were asking it to render.

For each image, we first wrote a detailed description of the visual scene, which was then fed into an AI program for it to render as a cinematic still. Each prompt text called for a visualization of a specific animal in a specific environment, facing a specific threat, with added visual and emotional descriptors to ensure a uniform look and feel across the entire ultimate series of images. While AI image generators can render impressive and very realistic-looking results, the output is still highly varied. AI-generated images often contain incorrect or illogical elements, artifacts, or perspectives that make them feel “wrong” or “unnatural.” Multiple sets of renderings, variants, compositing, and traditional photo editing tools were used to deal with these issues and to fine-tune the final images.

Results

Brand Awareness & Community Engagement

• Impressions: 136,075
• Reach: 103,676
• Reactions: 20,740
• Comments: 362
• Shares: 5,486
• Saves (IG): 1873

As one of our goals was to create shareable content, it was successful with nearly 5,500 shares across social media. The comments on these posts and shares evoked great emotion, especially for animals, about how we must do more to fight climate change.

These images were also promoted by other brands, increasing our reach to audiences outside of animal rights. With 103,000+ individuals seeing our content, we’re incredibly proud of the success these images had in increasing brand awareness.

Social Impact:

We’re proud to say that these images were incredibly well-received across social media, with many of the comments discussing how human activities impact the planet’s inhabitants who we don’t always think of in our daily life. This allowed us to offer solutions to ways to fight climate change, including eating more plant-based foods and ending animal farming. Some comments left on these images include:

• “This is a beautiful world humans are destroying”
• “They all break my heart. It's hard to breathe looking at those photos.”
• “Heartbreaking that this is becoming reality.”
• “Climate Change is an emergency that affects us all now, no matter where we are on this planet.”
• “These are powerful images that convey the necessary realization of what we are looking at…”

Because of these images, we were able to show that injustices to our planet include injustices to animals—reminding people of these forgotten victims of climate disasters.

Media