Summary:
- Campaign: “Lungs”
- Slogan: “Before it’s too late”
- Ad Agency: TBWA\Paris
- Target Audience: General European public
- Goal: To raise awareness about deforestation and its devastating impact on the environment and human life.
- Key Element: A striking visual metaphor that connects the destruction of forests to a direct threat to human health.
A Powerful Metaphor for a Global Crisis
Launched in 2008 by WWF France and the advertising agency TBWA\Paris, the “Lungs” campaign used a single, powerful image to communicate a complex environmental issue. The ad, a print medium campaign, featured a photograph of the Amazon rainforest cleverly manipulated to resemble a pair of human lungs. Rivers were rendered to look like blood vessels, reinforcing the life-giving connection between the forest and humanity.
The central visual impact came from a scorched or deforested area within one of the “lungs,” creating a powerful and alarming contrast to the lush green of the rest of the forest. This visual metaphor was designed to be instantly understandable, drawing a direct parallel between the destruction of the planet’s forests and a fatal disease affecting the human body. The simple, yet urgent, tagline “Before it’s too late” served as a stark call for action.
The campaign’s strength lay in its ability to bypass emotional pleas about wildlife and instead focus on a universally understood concept: health. By framing deforestation as a threat to our own ability to breathe, the ad made the distant, abstract problem of environmental destruction feel personal and immediate to a broad audience.
