For today’s Arbor Day, Aktion Baum is launching a visually stunning campaign staged by FRASER, which will be rolled out for three weeks in print, (D)OOH, TV, cinemas, and on social media with a media volume of more than one million euros.
One-third of Germany’s land area (11.4 million hectares) is covered by forest. The federal government’s official annual forest condition survey shows that damage is still at a very high level. Only a fifth of all trees in this country are still healthy, according to the 2022 Forest Condition Report. Huge areas are currently dying before our eyes, 400,000 hectares — 3% of Germany’s total forest area — in the past four years alone.
Areas of our forests that used to be green and full of life are in danger of becoming deserted — a dystopian perspective on areas of land that Germans know from their immediate surroundings, a wound, so to speak, into which the FRASER campaign puts its finger.
FRASER’s creative director Fernando Barbella and his team created an AI-generated photo series for the nationwide campaign that shows perspectives of forest areas in different parts of our country — such as the Black Forest or the Bavarian Forest, forests in the Sauerland and Harz Mountains, the Taunus Forest, and the Strausberg Forest near Berlin — and shows how AI imagines our forests in the near future.
"We wanted to create a perspective that would make Germans act to prevent these catastrophic scenarios,” says Lars Hermes, founder and CEO of the non-profit organization Aktion Baum. “In these times when we’re all using artificial intelligence for fun, we want to remind people to use their own intelligence to engage with real and tangible things — like planting much-needed trees.”
“The campaign is also called 'Imagine' because at Midjourney, who we worked with on this, every prompt starts with that word,” adds Fernando Barbella from FRASER. “We are very happy that we can support Lars and his fellow campaigners with this campaign!”
Media partners supporting the Aktion Baum campaign are WallDecaux, Sitour, BurdaForward, Cinemotion, OneFootball, the Berliner Kurier, and the Berliner Zeitung.
