True Crime in the Deep Sea: Best Regards from Greenpeace
Greenpeace and the Zurich-based agency Freundliche Grüsse are using a true-crime aesthetic in a digital campaign. They aim to shed light on the role of the Swiss company Allseas in deep-sea mining.
Greenpeace and the Zurich-based agency Freundliche Grüsse are jointly launching a digital campaign. Its goal is to expose the activities of the Swiss company Allseas in the deep sea. The campaign is titled «Tatort Tiefsee.».
Greenpeace Best regards: A crime scene without an audience
According to the campaign, corporations and politicians want to plunder the deep sea. The plan is to extract manganese nodules containing nickel, cobalt, and copper from the seafloor. This project will cause irreversible damage to ecosystems that have been less explored than the Moon. Nevertheless, Allseas, a company based in Châtel-Saint-Denis, Fribourg, is aggressively pushing forward with commercial deep-sea mining. Because the company operates largely behind the scenes, its role has so far remained invisible to the Swiss public.
Investigation Team in the Movie
Part of the campaign is a film that focuses on the crime scene, the victim, and the perpetrator. The central element is a team of investigators examining the crime scene in the deep sea. The trail leads from the endangered deep-sea creatures all the way to Allseas’ corporate headquarters in Châtel-Saint-Denis. This is intended to highlight the urgency of the situation: While the crime scene lies thousands of meters below the ocean’s surface, the responsibility lies right on our doorstep.
A Break from Traditional NGO Communication
The narrative structure deliberately breaks with conventional patterns of classic NGO communication and employs a true-crime aesthetic. This stylistic element is intended to spark the interest of a target audience that has had little exposure to the topic thus far.
The campaign was conceived and implemented by Freundliche Grüsse. The initiatives include animated and static ads for social media as well as email communications. All of these initiatives aim to direct interested individuals directly to the Greenpeace petition in order to increase political pressure on those in charge.
Responsible at Greenpeace: Linda Burger (Digital Fundraising), Vanessa Tschan (Digital Fundraising)
Responsible at Friendly regards: Pascal Deville, Samuel Textor (Overall Responsibility), Andrea Aegerter (Consulting), Timotheus Ueberall (Text), Kevin Zysset (Art Direction), Luzian Schlatter (Director)
