HYUNDAI | TREE CORRESPONDENTS | 2025
Trees report the news. Because they're the most reliable witnesses / HYUNDAI "TREE CORRESPONDENTS"
Giving trees a voice sounds like a clever idea right off the bat. But what they actually did was the opposite: they simply made it possible for humans to hear what trees were already saying. Deforestation is one of the causes of global warming, yet it only gets 5% of climate coverage. So they made trees into "correspondents."
The problem
Over ten years, Hyundai had planted one million trees in the IONIQ Forest. But planting alone doesn't move the news. Deforestation has no witnesses—nature had no "voice from the scene" for journalism to rely on. That's exactly what FCB New York zeroed in on.
The insight
Turning trees into cartoon characters wouldn't resonate, and dry scientific data alone wouldn't get anyone to read it. So they chose a style grounded in fact but told with the emotional voice of a diary. Trees are silent witnesses—and the bet was that putting their testimony into words would finally make climate change feel personal.
The idea
They attached sensors to trees in Brazil, South Korea, and the Czech Republic, collecting data on soil moisture and temperature. A custom LLM read this data and generated text blending scientific data with historical climate records, which FCB's editorial team then refined into each tree's own distinct voice. The Czech fir tree wrote: "At this rate, our habitat will retreat 25km northward in a century—far faster than we can keep up."
What happened
The campaign won two Gold Lions in Digital Craft at Cannes Lions 2025—the first Gold Lions ever won by a Korean brand. It racked up 86 million views on YouTube and was featured in The Economist and National Geographic.
Afterthought
Honestly, this campaign feels almost unfair. They used AI not to "create" but to "listen." Instead of humans speaking for the trees, they let the trees speak for themselves. As someone from FCB put it: "We didn't give trees a voice—we just finally made it possible for people to hear them." That one line explains the whole thing.
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2025
