How do you get apathetic upper LSMs to recycle?
If you’re The Glass Recycling Company of South Africa (TGRC), you create a TV ad that draws parallels with banking. “When you put something in, you get something out” is the idea behind TGRC’s latest advertising campaign, conceptualised by Ant Hanly and Charmaine Harvey of Tribe Sauce, working with TGRC CEO, Shabeer Jhetham, to produce the storyboard and script.
Nothing was left to chance in this important communication. Several concepts were submitted for pre-research testing by the creative team. But independent research indicated an “exceedingly high liking score of 8.1 for the ‘Glass recycling is like banking’ concept advertisement with a greater interest in seeing the impact of recycling within an environmental sphere”.
“This positive association with glass recycling helps people to understand that they can contribute to our environment, and still gain from the benefits derived,” Jhetham said.
Interestingly, the research also revealed the majority of glass recycling in South Africa is done by lower income consumers who “recycle both for monetary reward, and due to a consciousness of the value and impact of recycling”.
The television commercial was produced by Stephen Hanly locally and animated in Ireland by Street Monkey.
“The greatest advert creation challenge was to build and animate an African environment, with bottles and jars, and ensure the animation was realistic so that the visual picture plays between reality and animation,” said Jhetham.
“The environment and animals were made up of very real bottles and jars in a way that the viewer sees shapes. The addition of animal movement creates a new world not seen before by the consumer,” he said.
Tribe Sauce’s Ant Hanly said the challenge was breaking away from the “mundane format” of standard environmental communication “and truly reveal the power of packaging in a noteworthy manner”.
As such, the animation was a key component of the ad. Hanly said animation software programmes including 4D cinema, After Effects and Avid were used during a six week period using 16 computers to render different aspects of the commercial. “Each bottle seen in the advert was rendered separately and then placed in position. In addition special lighting techniques were applied to realistically depict the transparent property of glass. The final scene required the rendering of millions of minute bottles from above so that one could visualise the impact of glass recycling on a vast scale,” Hanly said.
The ad is being flighted across the public broadcaster and pay-TV channels. It can be seen on eNCA, SABC3, SABC2, KykNET, M-Net, BBC Brit, BBC Earth, Discovery Channel, Food Network, and the SuperSport Channels.
The emphasis, however is on the higher income groups “who currently do not recycle as frequently as the lower income groups”.
