AUDIOVISUAL
Most people don't know that Chinese wedding dinners are one of the biggest causes of shark killings. Ogilvy & Mather, Singapore joined forces with animal welfare organisation the Animal Concerns Research & Education Society (ACRES) to get this message across.
In this powerful film, by painting wedding banquet spoons that shark fin soup is traditionally served with, Ogilvy & Mather, Singapore told a story of how love often has a twisted and brutal end for sharks, and remind everyone that they each have a part to play in stopping the shark fin industry.
Beautifully animated and set to a piano soundtrack, ad shows the story of two people who meet, fall in love and decide to get married. At the wedding a celebratory crimson drink is poured onto a tower of glasses.
The crimson eventually transports us to the bottom of the ocean where we see sharks brutally caught and butchered for their fins before being tossed into a pile of others which have suffered the same fate. The endline reads: “Your wedding shouldn’t leave an aftertaste of cruelty”.
“The majority of the demand for shark meat is from the shark-fin industry, centred in Asia ,” says ACRES.
Video: Acres "Tools of Destruction" by Ogilvy & Mather, Singapore.
“Singapore is one of the main consumer countries, along with Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Thailand. For every Chinese wedding banquet in Singapore that serves shark fin soup, the world loses another 40-50 sharks.
“Removing sharks will result in the collapse of the entire marine food web. It's like a big tower of jenga; you take out a key brick at the bottom and the whole thing collapses. This is because of a phenomenon called ‘Trophic Cascade'.
“According to the latest estimates, over a 100 million sharks are killed each year for their fins. Shark populations are now reduced by 70% in some species and up to 98% in species like tiger sharks, hammerhead sharks, bull sharks and blacktip sharks. Sharks are also slow to recover from over-hunting because they are slow breeding and slow-maturing apex predators.”
The spot was produced by Singapore-based studios, Coalition and Studio on Third Ave and has already been a creative success, winning the Gold in the film category at Spikes Asia.
Ogilvy and Mather, Singapore, aren’t strangers to creating work related to marine conservation. Their series of ads created for WWF Singapore in 2012 set out to promote WWF’s Singapore Seafood Guide – an initiative aiming to ingrain a ‘code of conduct’ in seafood fans to encourage consumption of cultivated resources and selected sustainable fishing sources.
