The Woolmark Company is a non-for profit, it is the global authority on Merino Wool and represents the wool growers, distributors and promotes the entire supply chain.

The brief: Make people feel the impact of their fabric choice on the planet. Make fabric impact an immediate and salient consideration when they buy clothes. To do this, we plunged them into the sticky, oily truth of synthetic production and invited them to Wear Wool, Not Fossil Fuel.

Objectives: To increase fabric consciousness and consideration of wool as an eco-fibre, helping the general consumer understand how polluting synthetic fibres are.

The idea was to make the environmental impact of fabric choice visceral and immediate for our consumer. We needed them to physically feel the problem of synthetics as well as the natural, renewable solution of wool. To do this we plunged our audience into the sticky, dark truth by dramatising the amount of oil used to manufacture synthetic clothing every 25 minutes. The opening scene of our film sees our protagonists struggling and gasping for air in an olympic swimming pool full of oil. Our 3D OOH used the massive scale of screens in Piccadilly and Times Square to bring the size of an Olympic pool to life. We then show our audience that change is possible and the solution already exists in natural, renewable and biodegradable merino wool. Our characters crawl out of the oil and emerge in beautiful nature, able to breathe again.

A qualitative survey showed that 60% of people knew that wool was natural and that the majority of people felt that synthetics were not good for the environment. And yet, consumers were buying more synthetic clothing than any other kind and wool’s market share was rapidly declining.

From this data, we knew that it would not be enough to simply communicate that wool is good for the planet and synthetics are bad. Our research showed us that the environmental impact of clothing was one of the last things on people’s minds when shopping. Instead it was physical comfort and social status that was driving their decision making. For our message to sink in and change behaviour, we had to reframe our problem in these terms. We called on a public enemy (fossil fuel) and showed the uncomfortable impact of synthetic clothing not just on our planet but on people’s skin.

The campaign consisted of Online Video in France, UK, US, Germany, Japan and Australia, Static Flyposters in Key Cities, DOOH in New York and London, 3D anamorphic activation, Global Digital Hub and Wetransfer page takeover, Paid Social Media (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube).

Timeline: September 5th to 30th October 2022. Each activation was planned around key dates during their respective Fashion Week moments and timings planned around when footfall and impact would be at their highest.

Throughout the campaign we operated with agility, from pivoting from content and editorial partnerships (Highsnobiety) to constantly monitoring & optimising towards where we were seeing the strongest performance. We adjusted our YouTube strategy to promote the longer-length edits, swapped out WeTransfer creative to allow greater engagement & paused all media channels reactively following news of the Queen passing - liaising with media partners and industry bodies to understand when to go relaunch.

+13% Increase in consideration for wool in the UK

79% of viewers said this advert made them think twice about the environmental impact of their clothes

78% of viewers said that this advert would make them consider fabric when buying clothes

193M people reached globally

197 media titles picked up the story across the world