We’ve all heard the alarming predictions about climate change, but still we struggle to take meaningful action. As a result, Western Digital and Wired worked together to expose the urgency of climate change and illustrate that message in a new way. Leveraging Wired's influence and Western Digital's valuable data points, the team aimed to make climate change feel immediate and relevant to our daily lives. The result is the short documentary “What Could Happen In a 4C World?”

"What Could Happen In a 4C World?" is a short documentary that successfully marries Wired's influencer insights and Western Digital's data. Instead of trapping viewers in a science class by throwing indigestible data points about climate change at them, the team decided to take a more creative path. Rather than just telling viewers how dramatically lives can change from the climate change' drastic impact, why not just show them?

Wired's goal is to not only reach a large and influential audience, but to persuade them about what's possible when technology intersects with human ingenuity. Western Digital aims to highlight the world's biggest problem by making climate change feel tangible and as urgent as it is in reality. The strategy was to utilize Wired's access while leveraging Western Digital's data to inspire action. There's no better way to pursue this strategy than painting an incredible accurate, yet fictional scenario of a warmer planet and how that would impact daily lives.

We leveraged Western Digital’s data to show how even a change of 4 degrees celsius will change our way of living. i.e. eating insects. Comedian Aparna Nancherla explores how global warming and climate change will directly affect our lives 100 years from now when the average global temperature is projected to increase by 4 degrees Celsius, or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Nancherla met with Professor of Atmospheric Science at UC Berkeley, Inez Fung, and Chief. Strategically casted, Nancherla was already a rising star at the time of our production and has taken off even more since then. The program is 14 minutes long—a deep, thoughtful look at a complex topic that’s rare in the branded world. The film mixes Western Digital subject matter experts with semi-fictional scenes of a near dystopian future. Fiction is another rarity in branded, and this brand of “fiction” is unique in its execution.

The film surpassed 1 million views on YouTube alone, with a remarkable average watch time of 10 and a half minutes and an average percentage watched of 72 percent. The video's completion rate was 81 percent above benchmark and the view through rate was 96 percent above benchmark. and There are exceptionally few branded programs that could claim to engage viewers for an average of more than 10 minutes.