Design > Digital & Interactive Design
WHO WE ARE IS WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND: THE SUBARU ENVIRONMENTAL WEBSITE
CARMICHAEL LYNCH, Minneapolis / SUBARU / 2016
Awards:
Overview
Credits
OVERVIEW
CampaignDescription
So, to help inform people and spread the word, we reimagined their website as an organic, interactive and ever-growing place to house all their past, present and future environmental milestones — and we designed the whole thing on what we felt was the perfect foundation: a timeline in the form of a tree ring.
Plotted at points on each reactive and kinetic ring is a wealth of documentary videos, photography and information for people to explore, as well as ways visitors can get involved and help the parks reach this historic goal of eliminating over 100 million pounds of garbage from the planet.
Execution
Our idea for a timeline in the form of a tree ring came directly from the DNA of the National Parks. Often times, individual parks will use a cutaway of an ancient redwood tree to show on each ring when significant events in world history occurred, the signing of the Magna Carta, say, or the birth of Abraham Lincoln. We simply executed this digitally in an interactive and uniquely organic way, a UX that charmed visitors into learning about Subaru’s history without it feeling overly academic or lecturing them.
Outcome
Site traffic jumped from 20,103 in 2014 to 1,013,138 in 2015 — an increase of 5000 percent, with time spent on the site increasing from an average of 8 seconds to well over 3 minutes — all as a direct result of our efforts. And, most importantly, it firmly established Subaru as a company committed to sustainable behavior and positioned them as uniquely qualified to share their environmental expertise with the National Park Service in hopes of ending garbage in these incredible places forever.
Strategy
Strategically, we understood that once we had the website built, we had to get people to visit and entertain/inform them. To do so, we made the experience of the site extremely tactile and organic, encouraging people to explore the hundreds of nested pages on the site. We also filmed several documentary videos following the progress of Subaru experts as they visited Yosemite, Grand Teton and Denali National Parks as part of their zero-landfill initiative. We then disseminated those videos on social channels designed to target consumers already interested in environmental issues, as well as National Park visitors. Once we had their interest, all the content on the website was highly sharable, creating a self-sustaining feed loop of new people to the site.
Synopsis
Early last year, Subaru surprised a lot of people when they committed to helping America’s National Parks become zero landfill — where all garbage, everything, is recycled or repurposed.
Many people wondered what qualified Subaru to do this, what expertise they brought to the table. These people didn’t know that, over a decade ago, Subaru became the first auto manufacturer in U.S. history to be zero landfill. Or that they’ve helped over 800 other companies follow suit. In fact, almost nobody knew anything of the company’s long history of doing right by the planet.
Our idea was to revamp Subaru’s stagnant environmental website to engage people and show them how environmentally responsible Subaru has been for much of their history.
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