Campaign Identity: Choke
Design: Lovers | Creative direction: Marcela Terán, Greenpeace UK
In early 2017, Greenpeace launched an exposè of the soft drinks sector and their role in ocean plastic pollution. Following this, Greenpeace focused the campaign on Coke, the largest soft drinks company in the world. Valued at over $178 billion in 2015 and operating in over 200 countries, Coke has the means and influence across the sector to help end ocean plastic pollution. Yet despite claiming to care about sustainability, Coke was hiding the scale of its plastic footprint, diverting attention from their business practices by blaming consumers instead, and failing to take meaningful action to stop its products from polluting our seas.
Working with the design agency Lovers, we created an extremely effective campaign identity. It's Nice That wrote an article about Lovers' participation in various Greenpeace campaigns:
"Using parody to get around delicate IP laws, the images use the iconic Coca-Cola wave graphic, but instead populated with plastic bottles and a whale’s tail, with birds flying above. In Paul Kelly’s [Lovers designer] initial Greenpeace research he’d found Coke labels, so Lovers applied the textures and crumpled aesthetics from these labels on to the work."
The tagline “Don’t let Coke choke our oceans” alludes to the fact that 90% of sea birds are now estimated to have ingested plastic, and Coke – as a massive plastic bottles producer – is a major culprit in this issue.
Campaign posters and volunteer pasting posters on a hoarding wall.
Campaign materials and volunteers speaking to the public about the campaign
Beach clean and newspaper advert
Many Greenpeace offices also rolled out the campaign in their countries, adapting the style guide to their language and context.
Activities in various different countries.
At Christmas, we staged a protest at Piccadilly Square, home to Coke's most high profile advertising in the UK. A Choke-mas choir accompanied a forlorn polar bear puppet surveying its litter-strewn habitat.
Aware of Coca-Cola's investment in the 'holiday season', we also produced alongside Studio Weekend and director Jake Churchill, a remake of Coca-Cola's iconic 'The Holidays are Coming' advert, highlighting their role in ocean plastic pollution. Our spoof was launched on the same day that Coca-Cola first aired their advert on UK television in 2017. On the weekend of the launch, our advert gained more views than Coca-Cola's, and the campaign message managed to take over a high proportion of the conversation online about the brand. The ad was also covered by marketing press, with PR Week making it one of their top five Christmas campaigns of the year. This all helped add the pressure on Coke to take action on this issue.
The campaign was a huge success, the memorable tagline becoming so prevalent that even Michael Gove, UK's Environment Minister, was quoted talking about the “choking of our oceans” and crucially, with Coca-Cola launching a global plastics plan.
After months of fierce campaigning from Greenpeace offices around the world, and the actions of thousands around the world, in less than a year, we got the world’s largest soft drinks company to: admit their role in ocean plastic pollution, pressured them into developing a global bottle strategy, led them to increase the amount of recycled plastic content they use globally and got them to come out in support of deposit return schemes in the UK. That is huge! Though work still needs to be done.
We are continuing to keep up the pressure on Coke and other big users of throwaway plastic to take the bold steps we need to stop our oceans being treated like a dumping ground.
