All for bear

URL: http://allforbear.com
A digital project focused on the problems of polar bear preservation has been launched by BBDO Moscow. Allforbear.com aims to increase public awareness of the issue and involve many users.
Problem: With their natural habitat – ice – rapidly melting away, the 25,000 population of polar bears in the Arctic region is facing extinction. Estimates indicates that only ⅓ may survive by 2050, and the ice level last year has reached its minimum, showing a gap of the size of Turkey compared to the minimum level in 2007. The endangered future of the bears is made even worse by factors like climate change, fish migration, as well as poaching and pollution in the Arctic region.
Idea: To help the WWF raise money for the project and draw public and media attention to the problem, BBDO Moscow created a special website http://allforbear.com and encouraged users to share it in social media.
Solution: The website shows the virtual ice habitat of the polar bears surrounded by sea. Each click on the blue sea area turns water into a floe of ice, which gets their name, and give the bears more space to live in. The website mechanics are based on the Pay-With-A-Tweet concept: each click generates a sharing link for social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Vk.com. It is a simple viral growth formula: the more people visit the website and share it with their friends, the more donations are received by the WWF. By “buying” a bear to live on the ice, users support the preservation program and environmental projects and increase the survival chances of polar bears. Celebrities, bloggers, companies, radio stations and even football clubs are also encouraged to participate in order to spread the word and attract attention to the situation in the Arctic region.
Results: The website gained a great momentum, and without a single penny spent for media support the total audience of the project just in social networks amounts to over 6 million people by now. Russian outdoor media showed their support by providing free advertising spaces, while major online media and the Russian LiveJournal community promoted it on their websites completely free of charge! The giant ice floe also obtained its very own ‘walk of fame’, as Russian celebrities joined in to help save the polar bears. As a result, without having spent a single penny on media support, the campaign’s PR value in free media coverage reached the equivalent of around $1,000,000.