Emotive has revealed plans for the second phase of its Deep Rising campaign aimed at expanding its impact and reach.
The brief tasked the Coogee-based indie agency to raise awareness about the imminent threat of deep-sea mining.
The global citizen-led Deep Rising impact campaign aims to prevent ecological destruction before it even starts.
Emotive CSO and managing partner Michael Hogg said the major pro-bono campaign was so different from the work the agency normally does.
“Sometimes you get to point your skill set at something that feels important on a fundamental level,” he told AdNews.
“We could have been Deep Rising agency for six months. Everyone here would have been stoked to go all in, but the lights would have turned off. We wouldn't have had a business at the end of it.
“But it's good to see people actually commit to the work that comes through the door… I think it's cathartic for people to work on a different shaped thing with a non-commercial outcome.”
Miners are attempting to turn a vast area of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), spanning more than four million square kilometres in the Pacific Ocean, into the largest mining site on earth.
Companies with ties to fossil fuels claim the ocean floor is a wasteland and that extracting critical minerals and metals, such as nickel, copper and cobalt, could cure the climate crisis.
However, the team at Emotive are hoping to change that narrative and show people that the deep seabed is teeming with life.
Hogg said there were eons of ideas but the team decided to use the concept of a land dispute, apply it to the ocean, and encourage as many people as possible to stake their claim online.
“The thing we're trying to tap into is fairness… It's not fair that someone is exploiting something that belongs to all of us for profit… What’s at the heart of it is a thing that’s shared,” he said.
“It's like having a communal oval and some developer going ‘I'm going to put some flats up on it’, people say ‘You can't profit from that, it's ours’. We’re trying to do that on a huge scale.
“If this happens in your backyard the heckles are up instantly, but making people care about something that's a long way away and isn't an imminent threat to them in any way is a massive challenge.”
Hogg said the agency created a ledger that is “completely transparent and can't be augmented or faked or altered in any way” which could be used as evidence in a court of law when the UN's International Seabed Authority (ISA) decides whether to move from exploratory licences to full mining licences.
“With a nice campaign loads of people like it but no one who's fighting the decision in the institutions where the decision’s actually going to be made could use it,” he said.
“The aim was always to create something that can be weaponised… The more people that do it, the bigger the bang.
“It's like a petition on steroids... Greenpeace has a petition, it's great, and it's got a lot of signatures on it, but the nature of ocean dispute and staking a claim feels more fundamental than that.”
However, Hogg has revealed that Deep Rising could have taken a different turn, with an electric vehicle activation showing where all the materials came from among the possibilities.
“You get a slick looking EV, but all the information would be about where the precious metals have come from,” he said.
“It's the whole anti-deep sea mining activation but you draw everyone in because EVs are great, and they're green, and everyone loves them.”
Hogg said the aim was, and still is, to get as many eyeballs as possible on the campaign, admitting that the biggest challenge has been exposure.
“In the absence of having loads of money we begged, borrowed and stole media and got great coverage but it needs another injection,” he said.
“That’s what we’re working on at the moment, how we get more eyeballs and awareness onto this topic.”
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