Friday, July 1, 2011

Greenpeace viral campaign with not very virile testimonials

by Eleonora Anello



A banner unfurled on the facade of the Mattel headquarters in El Segundo (California) and 6 arrests were the highlights of the new global campaign against deforestation, Greenpeace signed. With that billboard the activists have voiced Ken, who said "I give up. I don’t date girls that are accomplice in deforestation." The accusations are directed to the multinational company of toy and especially to Barbie, one of the best-selling dolls in the world, guilty of being marketed with packaging supplied by the industries responsible for the environmental disaster that is hitting especially Indonesia.

The blitz has officially broken the famous “plastic couple” and was preceded by the publication by the environmental organization (nearly 3 million members in 41 countries worldwide) of the report "Toying in extinctions", where it is shown that Mattel has established commercial relationships in the supply of packaging with Asia Pulp & Paper, a Singapore company of the Sinar Mas Group, which bought large areas of rainforest to get paper to sell at cheap prices. The APP defends itself saying that the packaging is produced with 96% recycled material, with the goal of reaching 100% by 2015.

The Greenpeace action is carried out on several fronts, preferring Internet and social media. In the first three days of the campaign, more than 700,000 people have seen the video interview, translated into 18 languages, where an unmanly Ken learns with dismay about the activities of his girlfriend and decides to break up with her.

To put pressure on the big U.S. brand in order to force it to revise his choices in the packaging industry, Greenpeace used mail bombing. On its site you can send a message to the CEO of Mattel with few simple clicks. And users seem to have appreciated: Mattel said it has received 83,000 e-mails of protest, but Greenpeace says that the mails sent from its servers were 200,000.

The war is viral and therefore runs mainly through the social media and the boycott has taken on such a vast scale that Mattel was forced to lock the comments and deleted any reference of the rainforests on the Facebook page of Barbie, more than 2 million followers. Those who want to join the protest are invited to take away "like" Barbie from the page and change the image of their profile with that of a sulky Ken.

On the Twitter front, in a short time, Barbie and Ken have become Trending Topics, and there are also parody-profiles of @Barbie and @Ken_talks arguing about deforestation.

In fact, Greenpeace has played on the recent reconciliation of the couple who monopolizes the games of millions of children. Has Ken made the right choice? And will Barbie stop deforesting the world? At present Mattel said it would immediately change its supplies, while Greenpeace expects an official document.

The campaign is brilliant and very funny; the media from all over the world talked about it, but, despite the great success, there is someone who just can not get a laugh. They are the feminist and gay committees who accused of sexism the action of Greenpeace. Besides, even Ken comes wrapped with the same materials of Barbie and he too is represented as a bit hysterical and booby gay. This part of the public does nothing but asking a legitimate question: can a campaign on environmental protection rely on a sexist message?

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