FABER-CASTELL | The Never-Ending Forest App | 2017
Point a camera at a pencil, and an endangered species appears / FABER-CASTELL "THE NEVER-ENDING FOREST APP"
Point your phone's camera at a colored pencil, and a jaguar or a sloth jumps out. A piece of stationery became a forest.
The problem
In the middle of the back-to-school shopping season, Faber-Castell faced a challenge: how to make people notice, once again, that its eco pencils stood for "forest conservation." Simply stating the fact that the pencils were made from reforested wood wasn't landing with kids or parents.
The insight
What if the pencil itself—a tool people touch every single day—could become proof that a forest exists? Rather than "explaining" that buying the pencil protects a forest, the idea was to let people actually experience it.
The idea
Using AR, they built an app where pointing your camera at each of the 13 colors of eco pencil makes a real endangered species appear in 3D—a jaguar, a sloth, a wolf, and more. The backdrop is Faber-Castell's actual company-owned forest of 10,000 hectares in Prata, Brazil. The app works like a field guide, letting you take photos and collect the animals. A team of around 100 people worked on everything from modeling the animals to implementing the AR.
What happened
The campaign won Gold in the Mobile category at Cannes Lions 2017, along with several other awards including Clio Awards and LIA Awards.
Afterthought
It's honestly surprising that something like this could be built around the pencil—one of the least "advertised" everyday objects in the world. Hearing the word "sustainability" doesn't really move you, but the moment an animal starts walking on your screen and you think, "oh, there really is a forest out there"—that click of understanding is exactly what creative work is for.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2017
