It started with a bang

A new campaign, a new frontier, old skool offline activism, new skool online activism, and a mixed up new frontier in between. By some reckoning I’ve been wearing the new digital headgear for a week, and whereas this lot has little to do with me, by heck it makes the online / offline world look like where it’s at. So this may be a blog in two halves – maybe three.

It started online with a video, and a classic brand attack on a company that buys from lots of other companies that buy from the big bad company that’s chopping down the rainforest.

It moved on to some activities in the US, before a whole load of fairly traditional activist activities in the UK, for which I will hand over to the charming narrator George.

Early one morning a small team of climbers snuck into a building site on Piccadilly Circus, to hang a big banner to say Ken dumps Barbie.



As climb actions go this went to plan, the climbers got later arrested, but were in general completely ignored for most of the day by the workers on the site. No one on site seemed to have even noticed the banner outside, and dressed as industrial climbers they were assumed to be on the job. This perception only really unravelled when someone got a bit peeved that they didn’t seem to be doing any work. After a longer while someone asked why, and when they explained to the supervisor that they were from Greenpeace, that they’d hung a banner etc, the dawning reality, and the confusion on the poor guys face – must have been a joy to see.

Meanwhile several smaller teams of volunteers toured London bus stops, adding full sized subverts – again Ken dumps Barbie – to the display adverts, with a great deal of technical expertise. The subverts lasted most of the week, as they seemed right for the space, and when a NGO friend asked how on earth the organisation could afford to pay for such coverage – well they didn’t.



And meanwhile, another six teams of volunteers travelled the early morning underground, adding in supplementary tube adverts – Ken dumps Barbie, to the mundane commuter fodder. A surprisingly mucky job, if ever I saw one. But again done with a speed and panache that suggests next time someone should give them more adverts.

So all in all, a mundane day, some clever communications, some nice coverage in the Sun, some new pictures and videos, but all very much the way they do things, there’s even some product stickering to come, and little related to the borderlands of online and offline activism.

Then everyone regrouped back at base for phase II – the launch of the Barbie hunt.