Did you know Copenhagen, one of the cleanest cities in the world, still suffers from air pollution? Before starting this campaign, I didn’t. How do you inform citizens about the increasing danger of pollution without it becoming fearmongering?
Before starting this campaign, I didn’t. Honestly I thought it was kind of silly to even address the issue with everything else going on. But our lungs are important, and we should watch out for them! Approximately 460 Copenhageners die too soon because of air pollution.
I provided creative ways to talk about pollution, and executed the visual part of the campaign. All of this was done in collaboration with my colleagues at Viegand Maagøe and the staff of Copenhagen Municipality’s health department.
At first, the campaign was meant to be a physical event. Unfortunately, it turned out that an even greater health risk hit Denmark in 2020; that being COVID-19. Therefore, we changed the campaign from being a physical event to a range of digital messages that were conveyed in social media and features in the press.
I wanted to work within the bright colorful universe Copenhagen’s visual identity is known for, and used that to differentiate the cast of characters personally affected by air pollution. Their bright colors are smothered by the ever present cloud of smog hanging around them, and the more space the smog takes up, the less colorful the image is. Pretty simple.
It was also a priority for me that the cast was ethnically diverse. In these types of campaigns the default character is often white, and only rarely are there any people of color represented. But everyone breathes – even Muslims! As such, everyone should be able to identify themselves in the material we provided.
We created a campaign website as a hub, where citizens could find more information. The main goal of the campaign was to create awareness that air pollution is even an issue in Copenhagen – only then can we expect our audience to act on that knowledge.
To lure people into the site we made several pieces of content for Facebook and Instagram, news stories in traditional media, as well as physical posters at bus stops.
See more at renluft.kk.dk – the site launched in August 2020.
