How this PR campaign got a boost from influencers and Bollywood
Passing on a climate-related campaign to India’s best content creators ensured a push from huge Bollywood star Jackie Shroff (and a thumbs-up from Sir David Attenborough himself) as we find out here…
Working with Sir David Attenborough on shows such as Our Planet, Colin Butfield knows a thing or three about telling compelling sustainability stories, whether it’s capturing heart-wrenching footage of an albatross chick choking on plastic, or the emotive plight of a starving polar bear family scrounging for food in an increasingly iceless Arctic.
However, when the co-founder and executive producer of Studio Silverback wanted to launch a climate-related campaign to coincide with the G20 summit in India last year, he opted for a different tack. Rather than getting his production company to shoot a documentary, what if… he handed the reins over to India’s growing army of content creators instead? After all, videos made by beauty influencers or cookery vloggers were more likely to resonate with audiences who might swipe when another video about cyclone-damaged crops appears on their feeds…
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. So here’s some context: at present, India is on the frontline of the climate crisis. This summer, the longest heatwave in the country’s history has killed more than 100 people with thermometers hitting 50C. Floods, cyclones, landslides and other extreme weather events have seen crops wither away and livelihoods wrecked.
Back in early-2023 Butfield had been chatting with Indian filmmakers and conservationists about these environmental issues when somebody mentioned the G20 summit taking place in Delhi that September.
"They felt the G20 was an incredible opportunity to do something [publicity-raising] and push the climate crisis up the agenda,” recalls Butfield, who led many high-profile PR campaigns in his previous job as executive director of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). “We knew straightaway that shouldn’t be British camera crews telling Indian stories, but a few short clips, using some of the best cinematographers in the country.”
At the time Butfield was launching the groundbreaking Open Planet, a non-profit open-source library which gives away free, high-quality environmental footage and data visualisations to activists, educators, changemakers and policymakers, all over the world, to help them tell stories about our changing planet. Created by Studio Silverback in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, this democratisation of resources has been crucial in helping to amplify diverse voices and inspire collective action at a critical time for achieving global sustainability targets.
Butfield had a brainwave. “People consume media in more atomised ways today,” he says. “Mainstream broadcasters and documentaries will always have a place, but if you really want to change the world, it’s about allowing the millions of content creators to tell stories in their own ways and languages about their own realities. These content creators know who they’re speaking to and what connects with their audiences. And that can only be achieved by democratising the assets of storytelling.”
INFLUENCER INGENUITY
So, the footage of Himalayan mountains and Bangladeshi lakes shot by the Indian film crews would be given to influencers via Open Planet for them to highlight the climate crisis in in their own idiosyncratic ways through the prism of cookery, fashion and more.
The filmmakers finished shooting in summer 2023, just before monsoon season threatened to deluge the country. After partnering with Indian creator platform pluc.TV, Studio Silverback and Open Planet started contacting around 40 local influencers about putting their own unique twist on the footage. Still, timing was tight. There was just two months to go before the world’s leaders descended upon Delhi for the summit.
This is where the ingenuity of the content creators took hold. Within just 48 hours, they’d taken Open Planet’s footage to whip up a series of videos which spanned the gamut of human emotion: funny, harrowing, informative.
Social activist Ripu Daman Bevli created a tongue-in-cheek video showing doing squats and lunges while doing a ‘trash workout’ (exercising while picking up litter). There was a video from personal finance creator Anuhka Rathod showing viewers how to assemble a capsule wardrobe to control their carbon footprint. Other clips showed tips on reducing food waste, how to save on electricity bills and what people can learn from rural villages about sustainability.
If the videos had a theme, it was that of ‘Jugaad’: the Hindi term which describe the way Indians use creative thinking to solve problems with limited resources. Travel across India and you’ll see countless examples of jugaad: rickety trucks powering the electricity of an entire village, or TV aerials fashioned from coat-hangers. This can-do spirit synchronised with the clever, quickly improvised videos made by the content creators.
And here’s why everyone’s talking about it. Because this Indian campaign was special. Not least, because the Planet India project was an enormous success, generating the kind of publicity most sustainability storytellers can only dream of. As Butfield says, “There was no hand-holding the creators… the jugaad spirit grabbed everybody and the project just flew.” Some 400 million people viewed the influencer-created videos with the first two weeks. Soon, it would be lauded by politicians and Bollywood stars alike, as well as mentioned in the UN.
“It exceeded all our expectations,” says Butfield. “Instead of telling 10 hero stories, we managed to unleash thousands of stories, which generated a real groundswell of interest. Depicting normal people finding their own ways of solving problems really caught fire; it hit the mood perfectly.”
BOLLYWOOD STEPS IN
In the run-up to the G20 summit, Bollywood star Jackie Shroff stepped in to help the initiative’s promotional push. Shroff is huge in India. The screen legend is also a committed environmentalist; for many years Shroff has been in the habit of showing up at red-carpet premieres with a potted plant.
The content creators’ videos were placed on JioCinema on 8 September 2023. Planet India spent its first fortnight trending at number four on the streaming platform; it’s estimated the videos were watched 400m times in the first two weeks (with 421m users, JioCinema has more subscribers than Netflix). On X (Twitter), Planet India was the top-trending topic. Meanwhile there were over 200m media mentions in the likes of India Today, The Indian Express and MSN; social media impressions reached 101 million.
“Planet India worked because these people were telling stories about their reality, not something scientists or the government has decided is top priority,” says Butfield. “If our production company made a video about beauty and the climate crisis, we probably wouldn’t make a good job of it. Plus, it’d take us a lot longer – sometimes up to eight weeks to edit. But these content creators do this, day-in, day-out. Their audience is much more interested in what they have to say, so these environmental issues will resonate with their followers much more than a video from a company like mine, or a corporate video.”
There was also another, sadder reason which explained why so many people watched the videos. “In India, people are unfortunately feeling the climate crisis every day: heatwaves, floods. For the younger generation, that’s scary.”
When the premiere took place at Bikaner House (an ex-maharajah’s residence in New Delhi) in early-September, Bollywood actors, politicians, UN ambassadors, environmentalists (plus the content creators too) all attended the screening. Shroff was also there, rocking up with 350 plants, many of which he gave to people in the audience. The tentacles of Planet India spread long after the G20 summit: when Bollywood actor Dia Mirza visited the United Nations a few weeks later, she talked about the project.
A RESOUNDING SUCCESS
It also got the thumbs-up from another broadcasting superstar. “I chatted with Sir David Attenborough about the project a fair bit,” says Butfield. “One of the things that amazes me about him is that he gets lots of letters from young people and spends as much time – or even longer – responding to their questions than he would a business-leader or politician. I suspect he’s seen a sea-change during his life, from when the climate crisis wasn’t an issue to something that’s really galvanising young people.”
Planet India showed Butfield that Open Planet’s open-source model worked. It also proved that there were other ways to highlight the climate crisis rather than bludgeoning viewers with bleakness.
“One of the flaws we’ve had in the last few decades is that sustainability and the problems of the world are often told in a worthy way,” says Butfield. “It can leave you ending up feeling quite defeatists… The climate crisis feels like something we should care about, but you don’t want to read or watch a programme on it… The content creators’ videos are incredible, interesting human stories, as well as about the environment.”
Open Planet is hoping to repeat the India campaign in Brazil, where the next G20 summit is taking place in Rio de Janeiro in November, and Cop30 will be held in the Amazonian city of Belém next year.
However, its 10,000+ clips are available to use for anybody (not just Indian influencers) to tell their own environmental stories, who can access them via Open Planet’s website. Despite Butfield’s claim that the free open-source model could “transform people’s ability to tell stories on these issues”, there’s a nagging concern the footage could fall into the wrong hands, used by climate-change deniers or political parties.
“We did worry about this at the beginning,” says Butfield. “While it’s going to be impossible for us to stop everybody doing well, our view is that in the end the good of this will outweigh anything negative. That’s been the case so far. The only way you can get more stories out there is by giving it to people who want to do it…”
Christian Koch is an award-winning journalist and editor who has written for the Sunday Times, Guardian, Evening Standard, Metro, Director, Cosmopolitan, ShortList and Stylist.
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