If we don’t stop overfishing, our oceans will soon carry more marine debris like fishing nets than actual fish. How do we make fish eaters aware of this?

Challenge

Lots of people love to eat some freshly caught fish. But there’s a catch: if we continue fishing the way we do now, there won’t be any fish left in a couple of decades. Just oceans filled with debris. We wanted to make fish eaters aware of this in a compelling way.

Idea

To highlight this ongoing catastrophe, we created a look at the future fish market of 2050. We turned discarded fish nets into fish to illustrate the impact of overfishing on marine life and offered them in a classic Dutch herring cart. Via QR codes on the price tags of the fish, people could get more information. To make people outside of Amsterdam aware, we issued a press release followed by a film on social media.

Results

With zero media investment, we managed to reach more than 84 million people, generating global interest for the current problem of overfishing. We received attention in social- and mass media, including national and international newspapers and news services. The estimated views totals at 1.34 million, with 39.3k engagements.