Surfrider Foundation Europe is a non-profit organisation dedicated to defending, saving, improving and managing in a sustainable manner the ocean, coastline, and waves. One of its main objectives is to raise awareness of the importance of protecting the coastlines and of becoming an 'eco-citizen', thus it was one of our campaign’s objectives too. But beyond this awareness issue, we needed to mobilise as many people as we could for volunteering at the organisation’s annual beach clean-up weekend.

In order to engage people with this cause, we wanted to stress our responsibility as consumers in coastline pollution: because pollution is actually an issue that starts way before the beaches. It starts by our acts of purchase. Every product that we buy becomes trash that we throw away. We decided to express this, unfortunately too common product’s life cycle destiny.

Not only did we hijack promotional rhetoric, we also used its channels. In order to allow our audience not only to be aware of, but to really experience the truth of the equation consuming=polluting, we needed them to be impacted in the same way they are when mass retailers address their consumerist reflexes. Thus, we used all the traditional channels of promotional campaigns: radio, press, leaflets, banners and allowed for a fair turnaround of things.