Take Charge Battery Recycling Campaign

The brief

The Environmental Services Association wanted to deliver a campaign aimed at raising awareness of incorrectly recycling batteries – something which causes millions of pounds worth of damage at recycling centres every year and endangers the lives of the people who work in them.

Working with partner agency Different Bears, we developed the creative approach, website and digital assets for the campaign which was launched in the autumn of 2020.

What we did

At the outset of the campaign, we started by developing a theme for the based around ‘zombie batteries’ and the idea that – even after you have thrown them away, there is still the potential for the batteries to come back and haunt you. This created a natural linkage to a campaign launch around Halloween and gave an attention grabbing feel to a topic which could otherwise be seen as procedural ‘public information’.

Our design studio started by creating the visuals for the campaign, developing a range of zombie battery and electronic characters to illustrate the everyday items that zombie batteries can inhabit. We rolled this out across a campaign website, graphics and other campaign collateral to create a cohesive look and feel for the campaign.

Alongside this, we knew that video would be an important channel for communicating campaign messages, so we developed a film which presented the messages in a fun and engaging way, playing on public information style films.

To increase the reach of the campaign, we assembled the creative assets – including social media graphics, infographics and information on how to safely recycle batteries – into a digital toolkit that was distributed to ESA members and partners and used to amplify the messaging around the launch.

Results

The campaign launched just prior to Halloween 2020, achieving substantial national and international media coverage – including coverage on the BBC and Sky news in the UK and the New York Post in the US. This contributed to over 6,000 sessions on the campaign website and over 3,500 views of the campaign film in the two weeks following the launch.

Across social media, sharing of toolkit content by partners and through the campaign’s main channels, resulted in over 8,000 impressions on content posted through the campaign Twitter account and in excess of 1,500 mentions of campaign keywords across social media.