Heads up: there is no brand channel for this one, so both links are uploads by people who worked on it. The YouTube copy is from Stu Alexander, the campaign's senior art director; the Vimeo copy is from Gustavo Vampre, one of its creative directors. If YouTube ever drops it, use the Vimeo link.
Palau is an archipelago in the western Pacific with roughly 20,000 residents and, at the time, around 160,000 visitors a year. Eight tourists per resident. The reefs and lagoons that bring people in were being wrecked by the people coming in to see them, and a nation that small has no leverage over the airlines, tour operators and cruise lines delivering them.
The insight is uncomfortable and correct: signage does not work. Every reef in the world has a "please don't touch the coral" placard and every reef in the world gets touched. Tourists behave badly abroad because there is no consequence and no relationship. Nobody has ever asked them to promise anything, and the request has never come from someone they would feel bad letting down.
Change the country's immigration law so that entry is conditional on signing an environmental pledge, and stamp that pledge into the visitor's passport.
Not a poster campaign. A legal instrument. Every arriving visitor signs, in front of an immigration officer, a promise made to the children of Palau. The pledge itself was written with help from Palauan children, and it goes into the passport, next to the visas and border stamps, where you keep the documents that actually govern you.
It launched in December 2017 with the Palauan government amending immigration policy, so this is genuinely law, not a voluntary tick-box. Alongside it, a compulsory in-flight film called "The Giant" plays on every inbound flight, so nobody arrives at the desk cold.
"The Giant" is animated, drawn from an old Palauan legend, and written with the islands' children. It tells the story of a clumsy, careless giant who visits the islands and breaks everything without noticing, until the local children befriend him and teach him to be careful. The giant is the tourist, and you understand that about four seconds before you land and get handed a pen.
The stupid: respond to a tourism-driven environmental crisis by making the tourists sign something at the border. Add friction to arrivals in a country whose economy depends on arrivals. Ask a sovereign government to amend immigration law for what is, on paper, an advertising idea. Then make the compulsory in-flight entertainment a cartoon about how the passenger is a destructive oaf.
The smart: the passport is the point. A leaflet goes in the bin, a poster gets ignored, but a stamp in your passport is permanent, official and yours, and the act of signing your name in front of an official is a behavioural commitment device that decades of research says actually shifts conduct. Making the promise to children rather than to a government converts a rule into a relationship, which is the part a fine could never buy. And "The Giant" does the softening: by the time you sign, you have been given a story where you are the giant and you would rather not be. Every piece is doing a different job and they only work in that order.
The steal: when you cannot change the behaviour, change the moment. Palau had no power over how tourists act on a reef, so it moved the intervention to the one moment it fully controlled, the border, and made that moment binding. Find the point in the journey where you actually have authority, and put the idea there.
Also worth admiring: this was made by four women from Palau who founded the Legacy Project, not by a brand looking for a purpose platform. It is the rare piece of work where the client had the problem, the stake and the standing, and the agency's job was to find the mechanism. It shows. The idea has no advertising in it at all, and that is why it travelled so far.
Straight talk: the impressions and earned media figures are the campaign's own entry numbers and are not independently audited, so read them as scale rather than precision. The legal change and the pledge in the passport are the results that matter, and those are verifiable at any Palauan border desk.
Client: The Palau Legacy Project
Co-founders: Laura Clarke, Nicolle Fagan, Jennifer Koskelin-Gibbons, Nanae Singeo
Agency: Host/Havas, Sydney, with Red Agency
Executive creative directors: Seamus Higgins, Stu Turner
Creative directors: Paul Bootlis, Gustavo Vampre
Senior art director: Stu Alexander · Head of design: Darren Cole
Digital creative director: Josh Bryer
"The Giant": directed by Evan Viera, animation by Yukfoo
Written with: the children of Palau, and the Palauan government
D&AD 2018, Palau Pledge, Creativity for Good
Adweek, small nation, big wins
Fast Company, tourism-turned-environmental campaign wins top prize
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, academic case study
palaupledge.com
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: