Seventh Generation is on a mission to create a better today to help nurture the next seven generations. One of the issues they wanted to tackle is deforestation and how the little choices people make (like using conventional TP) negatively impacts our environment.

Our brief was to bring awareness to the fact that trees are unnecessarily cut down to create conventional toilet paper, and to inspire consumers to look for eco-friendly alternatives like Seven Generation’s recycled toilet paper.

We created “Trees and B’s,” a campaign that encouraged consumers to opt for recycled toilet paper by creating empathy for trees. Since people don’t have much sympathy for trees, but do have sympathy for people, we decided to give a tree a personality. We centered the campaign around Mike The Tree, Maya Rudolph’s “tree friend” that she meets in our :60 anthem spot where Maya sings the praises of making the switch to recycled TP. We also gave “Mike The Tree” his own handle on Twitter and Instagram where he made it clear that trees really don’t want to die for our butts. Mike’s social presence as well as our late night TV blitz all pointed to “The Root-In”, an event at Grand Central Terminal where we had over 400 trees protesting the use of non-recycled toilet paper.

People are pretty aware of the impact that their choices make on the environment -like littering, or not recycling, or using single use plastic. But most people aren’t aware of the impact that their household products have on the environment. In fact, around 380 trees are cut down in each of our lifetimes just to create non-recycled toilet paper. That’s a lot of trees dying just so we can wipe our butts.

We used this statistic to not only shock people regarding the deforestation happening to create conventional toilet paper, but to also make people feel personally responsible for the trees that are being cut down with their every choice of opting for conventional toilet paper.

Our campaign really centered around the “Root In” protest which contained over 400 trees protesting the use of non-recycled toilet paper at Grand Central NY on March 20th, the first day of spring.

To drive people to the event we created a :60 anthem spot where Maya Rudolph sings a ballad about switching to recycled TP in favor of saving her “tree friend” which aired on late night blitz on NBC across Jimmy Fallon, Carson Daly, and Seth Meyers.

We gave Maya’s “tree friend,” Mike the Tree, his own Twitter and Instagram handle where he encouraged people to join him at the “Root In” protest by posting tree jokes, and signs that he was making for the protest.

Lastly, we invited various influencers across NYC to join our “Root In” protest to post about the event, and encourage the use of recycled toilet paper to amplify our message.

There were over 15K Twitter conversations as a reaction to our campaign.

People said things like:

· “LOVE this! Didn’t even know recycled TP existed!”

· “I had never thought about where my toilet paper came from”

· “It’s such a simple switch!”

As a result, more people came out and bought Seven Generation’s recycled TP.

After our Trees & Bees campaign 2x24 Bath Tissue was up almost 20% vs. the prior weeks before event!

The campaign even had a halo effect on all Seven Generation products beyond TP.

Post Trees & Bees sales for all of our Seven Generation household products surged by 16%.

The biggest win was making people aware and arming them with the little things they can do to create a healthier planet for the next seven generations.