Addressing air pollution, literally
We talk to the AMV BBDO creative teams behind an innovative, award-winning project alerting Londoners to an invisible danger.
We all know that big cities are polluted. That the air we breathe is to some extent toxic. And that in theory it could affect our long term health.
But unless you’re cycling behind a fume-spewing truck, it’s just not very apparent. Not in your face, you might say, even if it is constantly getting into your lungs.
What few Londoners realise is that 10,000 of them die prematurely each year due to this unseen toxicity.
With that dreadful statistic as a starting point, AMV BBDO was set the task of making an invisible threat more…well, visible. And, ultimately, push the topic up the government’s agenda in the hope of forcing real change.
The result was addresspollution.org , more a major initiative than a simple campaign, and winner of no less than three golds at Cresta 2020.
Charged with delivering the work were AMV Deputy ECDs Toby Allen and Jim Hilson, and creative team Ben Polkinghorne and Scott Kelly.
“ The original brief from the client COPI* ( a creative industry alliance) was to make apathetic Londoners sit up and take notice,” Toby told us, “ and we wanted to respond with something meaningful that would drive systemic change.”
His partner, Jim, went on to explain: “ We needed people to understand the gravity of the problem and give them the tools to demand urgent action.”
For Ben and Scott, their own experiences as relative newcomers to the city helped in developing the agency’s response. “ We’d been working on the brief for weeks but hadn’t cracked it. In the back of our minds, we’d talked as a team about a London map which visualised air pollution levels with a sliding scale of colours. We’d seen that where we both live, on busy roads, air pollution was bad.”
This led the team to discover the work of King’s College, London, the UK’s leading authority on air pollution monitoring. With data from a state-of-the-art network of air quality sensors, the college was able to use sophisticated modelling techniques not just to create a map of the city’s pollution, but make it accurate to 20m sq. The ultimate pollution map, you could say.
With this data feeding into the campaign’s website, Londoners can now tap in a postcode and find the average level of pollution at any address in the city.
“The housing market is so important in London. Not just economically but culturally - Londoners love talking about property.” Toby and Jim told us, “ We knew if we could link air pollution to property we’d create economic incentives for people to care about it, but it would also make a lot of noise culturally.”
It certainly did make a lot of noise. Provocative billboards ran in some of the most polluted areas of central London, pollution ratings were projected onto high profile buildings and even political rapper DrillMinister was brought in to create a track called “Choke”.
The campaign became front page news, featuring in over 90 pieces of national and international press, TV and radio coverage. ( You can see some of this in AMV’s entry video.)
More important, perhaps, than this coverage was the detailed work to link pollution to individual properties. As Ben and Scott told us: “ Linking air pollution to property value made the problem personal for people. It helped turn air pollution from something that could be ignored to something that needed to be fixed as soon as possible.”
And in this they also succeeded. Thanks to addresspollution.org, the UK’s Secretary of State for Health introduced legislation that makes real estate agents, landlords and property owners legally obliged to disclose pollution ratings.
It means that buyers and renters in London can now check the rating of any property before they move, and negotiate lower prices in areas of higher pollution.
By linking a property’s value so directly to its pollution rating, the pressure to do something about this problem is no longer just a nice idea, it’s an economic imperative for all stakeholders in the property market.
So, with this success under their belt, how does the campaign develop and move on? Can we expect more from the team?
“ We haven’t stopped working on this since it launched in September 2019.” Ben and Scott tell us, “ COPI recently secured funding from ECF ( European Climate Foundation) and commissioned nationwide data for the UK. The data is for the year 2019 and consists of 1.5 billion data points. We’re going national.”
As we go to print (or its online equivalent), renowned medical journal The Lancet published a report on air pollution in over 800 European cities.
London, rather surprisingly, was only 186th on the list, with Madrid coming out as the most polluted, followed by Paris, Milan, Barcelona and Turin.
Perhaps, then, AMV and its BBDO network should consider their campaign as an export opportunity. And roll-out addresspollution.org not just nationally, but internationally.
addresspollution.org won a 2020 Cresta Gold Award for Integrated campaign, Integrated digital campaign and Creative use of Data. It also won a Bronze for Campaign website.
Meet the creatives
Toby Allen & Jim Hilson
This team’s portfolio is the stuff of dreams, packed as it is with iconic, award-winning work on brands such as Essity (Viva La Vulva and Blood Normal), Guinness, Nike, Levi’s, Honda and Audi.
They were the No 1 Creative Directors in the 2019 World Creative Rankings (Cresta’s rankings partner). And have so much ‘metal’ to their names it would be embarrassing to list all their Lions, Pencils and Crestas.
One of the things they are most proud of, though, is the creative academy (Hatch) they founded at AMV to draw in a more diverse young talent pool.
In their own words, they are “ a traditional team doing non-traditional work, shaping culture, making headlines and turning around businesses.”
You can see more of their work here.
Ben Polkinghorne & Scott Kelly
Ben and Scott are from New Zealand, where we assume air pollution levels are not a hot topic.
Having arrived in Europe six years ago, they are now thoroughly entrenched in London’s creative world, with a string of successful side projects as well as a fast growing slate of award winning work.
They have exhibited at the Seoul Museum of Art and in the UK. Their work has been sold by multiple galleries, they’ve been interviewed by the likes of BBC and Vice and featured on the Forbes ‘30 under 30’ list.
You can see more of Ben and Scott’s work and side projects here.
Their most recent work at AMV includes this deeply moving film for Macmillan Cancer Support which will surely feature strongly at 2021’s awards festivals.
*COPI is a non-profit creative industry alliance. People in film, ads, tv and music who care about what's going on. Together they run above the line campaigns created by the best in the industry. COPI also works with academics and scientists, so that all campaigns are based on the latest verified data and evidence. The aim of COPI is to re-balance the heavily corporatised information environment with stuff that actually matters, and raise awareness on issues of more pressing concern to society and planetary ecosystems than the unchecked profligate drive of consumerism.
