Going green: how Dennis Publishing and The Drum gathered a nation of tree huggers in a day
This year was Dennis Publishing’s second Do It Day, and the publisher chose to harness the power of 2015’s #treesfortrees campaign in order to spearhead a bigger, longer-lasting campaign and plant a larger forest to honour founder Felix Dennis’ commitment to tackling deforestation in the UK.
Dennis Publishing's Do It Day activity
The winning pitch at Plan It Day, #hugatree, was executed on Do It Day to kickstart a social movement in the run up to newly formed Plant It Day, where 15,000 trees will be planted in February 2017 to give the campaign longevity.
The idea behind the #hugatree campaign is to encourage awareness of the valuable UK forestry in order to prevent its decline, a topic close to the heart of publisher and its founder, who founded the Heart of England Forest charity in 2011. For every person that showed their love for trees and uploaded a photo using the hashtag, the publisher promised to plant a tree in exchange. That said, if the publisher does not reach 15,000 interactions, it still promises to plant the full forest.
Alison Hunter, a trustee of the Heart of England Forest and HR manager at Dennis, said: “Dennis Publishing got involved in Do It Day because we believe that our charity, the Heart of England Forest, can really help change the world just like The Drum are doing on Do It Day. We are aiming to beat our challenge from last year by planting 15,000 trees and starting that campaign with #hugatree.”
The Do It Day activity leveraged the publisher’s existing assets to drive higher social engagement, including a call to action to its treefortrees.co.uk website. Social was used as the crux of Do It Day activity, to encourage uptake nationwide.
This year Dennis got creative with its social activations by creating fun political snaps of Donald Trunk, Forest Johnson, Barack Oak-bama and Tree-sa May hugging trees to tap into political trends and propel the campaign globally.
The #hugatree campaign also included an experiential activation, whereby the publisher took walking talking trees around the streets of London to encourage passers-by to get involved. The trees toured Oxford Street, visited some media agencies close to the publisher around Soho, and made their way to Southbank where Do It Day’s main activity was taking place.
The publisher also erected a nine foot tree in their headquarters, to gain traction with the publisher’s 350 staff working there. Some of its brands created 360 videos on Facebook, while Alphr made a video of its staff doing the ‘mannequin challenge’ around the office’s nine foot tree.
Ads were pushed out on the much coveted space in Piccadilly Square in the morning and afternoon of Do It Day.
The brief changed slightly from Plan It Day, due to technical issues. The winning brief at Plan It Day, named ‘Hug a Tree, Plant a Forest’ included a voting system whereby contributors would be able to suggest a name for the forest at the same time as uploading their contributions. It took inspiration from the infamous 'Boaty McBoatface' campaign by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) which gathered enormous traction on social media. Unfortunately, the voting system used in the NERC’s campaign and those similar has to be built from the ground up and was not feasible for Dennis Publishing to activate in 24 hours.
Jerina Hardy, communications director at Dennis Publishing, said: “Do It Day was brilliant, it is great to get some fantastic creative minds in the room and work on some creative ideas.”
“Don’t forget your umbrella is what I took away from Do It Day” she added.