MTV has launched a global campaign – SWITCH – to encourage its viewers to help slow down global warming. It features 35 ads, created for free by the international in-house team and a variety of agencies including Cake and Lowe Worldwide, which aim to provide information and advice about climate change in a manner which appeals to the core 15-25 year old MTV audience.
The ads will be featured on TV, online and mobile MTV channels around the world; the content is also available cost-free and rights-free to other broadcasters. Celebrities including singers Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Shaggy, Rufus Wainwright and band Good Charlotte have recorded idents telling people to visit the initiative’s website.
The SWITCH campaign will be backed up with programming which illustrates some of the values involved. The Pimp My Ride show, where vehicles receive flashy makeovers, will feature a Chevy Impala being given an engine that will run on biodiesel. Two factual documentaries will also be shown under the campaign banner. Tine and Ife documents the results of a Nigerian oil spill and Tia chronicles the repercussions of illegal lumbering in Papua New Guinea.
Fellow Viacom-owned TV and online children’s channel Nickelodeon will also run an information push, aimed at getting 6-14 year olds thinking about how they could lower their families’ energy consumption. MTV has teamed up with Global Cool, the UN and Getty Images to help put the SWITCH material together.
Some of Brand Strategy’s favourites among the ads (which can be viewed from the website for MTV Switch – click here – are:
Global Rap by Cake – a “user-generated” video employing two YouTube stars doing their own, very cheesy but funny rap about climate change. It is intended to illustrate that solving global warming is also a DIY issue.
Busy Doing Nothing by Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide – pictures of sleeping politicians set to an amusing soundtrack, suggesting that nothing is being done politically on climate change.
Leo Helm by Wieden + Kennedy 12 – a small boy in the back of his dad’s biodiesel car explains to his younger brother exactly how he thinks biodiesel works. His brother goes to sleep.
