Case Study - World Land Trust

Background

The World Land Trust (WLT) is a charity carrying out life-saving work. It conserves the world's most biologically important and threatened habitats – and the species within them – for our future. And it's smart – strategically buying land and partnering with local organisations.

So far, they've saved over 2.6 million acres of land and have the ambition to protect another 1 million hectares by 2025.

They have many loyal supporters and patrons, including the iconic Sir David Attenborough. But they also have low brand awareness. For their first ever OOH brand campaign, they asked Media Bounty to bring them a new supporter base.

Challenge

No other charity matches the World Land Trust's impact on the natural world. In the words of Sir David Attenborough:

“The money that is given to the World Land Trust, in my estimation, has more effect on the wild world than almost anything I can think of.”

They’re also conservation's best kept secret, with a brand awareness of roughly 2%. Behind this lie three main reasons:

their complex projects can make it hard to grasp exactly what they do
people mix them up with other wildlife charities
people don’t make the link between the land in ‘World Land Trust’ and the species they save on the ground

When people do know about their work, they tend to be loyal and frequent supporters. Their core donors tend to be:

older
high net worth individuals and/or
wildlife lovers who live in London and the South East

To meet WLT’s ambitious targets, we needed to reach new audiences, across the UK.

Insight

Our work with Persuadable audiences shows many people find climate and other environmental issues overwhelming. So overwhelming, they don't feel they can make a difference.

This is a big problem. Because if an audience can't picture what you're fighting, how can they support you? Or "how does losing the Red-eyed Tree Frog in darkest Peru affect my everyday life?"

We know when the issue feels like it’s happening ‘here’ and ‘now’, mainstream audiences respond well. So, we needed to bring the World Land Trust's work closer to home.

Approach

Task 1. How do you get your audience to notice you when they link environmental issues to hopelessness?

Make it beautiful. And reward them for looking. Eye-stopping visuals with creatures moving in unexpected ways grabbed attention.

Linking local dialect to ad placement brought a smile. After all, would you expect a conservation charity to speak like you and know your city? We made the distant, local. From keeping places 'buzzin'' in Manchester to 'big savings' of species outside London's Westfield.

Task 2. How do you make sure people don't mix World Land Trust up with anyone else?

Make them the strapline. And not only that, make success a natural consequence of their work. Enter, 'Must Be World Land Trust' – a perfect vehicle for showing their impact. With results like WLT's, they're worth supporting.

Task 3. Expand our audience.

We placed our messages on Ocean’s Out of Home full motion displays. We chose cities where we could reach new target audiences: Manchester, London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Newcastle and Leeds. And we amplified the whole campaign through digital on Google, Meta, YouTube and TikTok.

We prioritised high dwell environments for a dual purpose. More people saw our message. While our billboards offered a peaceful break from the bustle of urban life.

Impact

Our campaign successfully raised awareness. Over 2.6 million people saw our billboards, while digital delivered 1.59M display impressions and 370,311 video impressions. As a result, traffic to the WLT website surged by 199%, 95% of which was from new visitors.

This spike in awareness drove donations.

World Land Trust saw an enormous 93% increase in income from the cities we targeted during the campaign. Even more extraordinary, the ads didn’t feature an explicit call to donate. And it boosted organic search too. Leeds rose from 36th in WLT’s website visitor rankings in August, to 11th in September. We saw impressive rises in Birmingham, Edinburgh, Manchester and Newcastle, as well.

Due to the success of the campaign, the World Land Trust team are keen to continue brand advertising on OOH in the future and are excited to take forward ‘Must be World Land Trust’ as their long-term creative platform.

Testimonial

“Media Bounty's execution of the 'Must be World Land Trust' Out of Home campaign was truly outstanding. Their creativity, strategic approach and understanding of World Land Trust and our work shone through, crafting a visually compelling and emotionally resonant campaign that successfully elevated awareness for environmental conservation.

In a critical period for climate action and biodiversity loss Media Bounty demonstrated a perfect synergy of passion and professionalism, whilst making a significant impact in promoting World Land Trust and our work as we confront the challenges of mitigating climate change with urgency and optimism.”