Monterey Bay Aquarium
Traditionally, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s advertising was focused on visitation. However, their market research showed that they could shift from a visitation-focused advertising and marketing message to a focus on their conservation programs.
Our first conservation-focused campaign was a big one, literally and figuratively. The Aquarium asked us to come up with an idea that would stop people, get their attention, and make them think about the problem of plastic in the ocean. Our idea? A life-sized blue whale made out of locally-sourced plastic trash, set in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge on Crissy Field. The campaign included digital, a short film we wrote, shot, edited and produced, and social media managed by the Aquarium.
“Every Nine Minutes” is a short doc we produced about the whale. It was selected at more than 15 film festivals around the country and the world (4 mins.).
The whale was inspired by a female blue whale that washed up onto a beach an hour north of San Francisco. To honor that whale, we built our whale to her dimensions.
The Blue Whale generated 550M+ press impressions, hundreds of thousands of impressions via foot and drive-by traffic and countless organic shared social media posts.
A few months prior to the whale’s installation, we helped the Aquarium with an out-of-home and digital campaign that focused on inviting visitors to the Aquarium. The campaign won Gold in the prestigious 2018 Graphis International Advertising Annual.
The team at MBA saw how successful the whale campaign was and decided to go all in on their conservation message. We developed the out-of-home and digital campaign featured below, as well as designed and built a food truck that served sustainably fished seafood to raise awareness for their Seafood Watch program.
