The Toronto Zoo’s polar bears are making an environmental statement–online and off–for the Toronto attraction.
The bears have been the focus of the zoo’s marketing campaign this year, featured most prominently in a television ad for its Tundra Trek exhibit. Toronto creative agency Lowe Roche is the zoo’s agency of record.
“We were doing a big campaign for the polar bear [exhibit], but the polar bear is inherently the symbol of wildlife conservation and environment issues. It gave us an opportunity to talk about the environment,” said Christina Yu, creative director at Lowe Roche.
The agency created PolarTweets.com, a site that tracks in real time the number of Twitter posts that hash-tag various ecological terms. Hash tags (#) mark words inserted into tweets for search and tracking purposes.
The microsite scans Twitter posts for words such as “polar bear,” and “green.” Keywords from those tweets create an iceberg for an animated polar bear to stand on. The more tweets, the bigger the iceberg and further from the rising ocean the bear stands. With fewer tweets, the bear gets closer to the melt water.
Copy on the site reads “25% of Arctic Sea ice has already disappeared. Without action, the polar bears could disappear too. You can make a difference. Start by making your next tweet about something environmentally friendly… So start spreading the word on all things green. Our little tweets can make a big difference to the future of the polar bear.”
In the two weeks since the site’s launch, approximately 2,000 people have visited and more than 1,920 #polarbear tweets have been logged.
Yu calls the site the first web application that shows eco activity on the Internet in real time, and provides “an incentive to tweet about something important.”
Events also play a role in the zoo’s ecological efforts. A model bear was placed atop 22 blocks of ice in downtown Toronto in mid-July. The ice melted over two days, illustrating the animal’s plight.
