Born Free is a charity dedicated to ensuring animals stay where they belong - in the wild. Its mission is to make sure the world has a varied ecosystem of wild animals. As such, it wanted more people to adopt one of the world’s many endangered animals, saving them from extinction. And it wanted to do this in the run-up to Christmas - a time when charities compete for attention.

Nature’s Closing Down Sale was a provocative and fully integrated campaign created in the style of a traditional closing down sale, but instead of the usual furniture store closing down, it’s nature itself. Launched on Black Friday, the campaign was designed to show people that the biggest reductions this year aren’t in the shops, they’re in the wild, and encourage them to adopt an endangered animal with Born Free.

The key fact we found was the shocking but little-known statistic that wild animal populations have reduced 70% since 1970. This told us about the plight of the natural ecosystem. We then did a deep dive and discovered more shocking statistics, like the White Rhino population has decreased by 90%! These figures were mind-blowing and we really needed a creative way to tell people about them and encourage them to adopt an endangered animal.

Once we’d come up with the idea of Nature’s Closing Down Sale, we knew we needed to launch the campaign on Black Friday. This is a time when sales language and visuals are everywhere. So by using sales language and imagery, and juxtaposing them with the natural world, we knew we’d achieve maximum impact. We wanted to steer shoppers away from splurging on disposable clothes and technology, and towards buying something meaningful for the natural world.

We launched Nature’s Closing Down Sale on Black Friday, a time when the sales were everywhere, and ran the campaign until Christmas. It featured an online sales commercial (starring Harry Peacock as the toxic face of late-stage capitalism), a suite of digital-out-home sales posters that ran on sites around the UK donated by Ocean Outdoor and Jack Arts, as well as being flyposted like a real closing down sale.

We couldn’t open a physical shop due to Covid, so we also created a pop-up Instagram shop - a grid of 12 shoppable Instagram posts, where people could adopt an animal. They could also adopt from a traditional retail website.