Hyundai's Tree Correspondents lets trees file climate dispatches via AI — 2 Cannes Golds

In 2025 Hyundai's IONIQ Forest initiative hit two milestones: ten years of reforestation and its one-millionth tree planted across 13 regions on three continents. But planting trees, FCB New York argued, wasn't enough — only about 5% of climate coverage mentions deforestation, so the driver of warming was going unreported. The agency's question: what if the trees could speak for themselves?

The answer was Tree Correspondents, an AI-driven system that turns trees into data-enhanced storytellers. METER Group installed live sensors on trees in Hyundai's IONIQ Forests in Brazil, South Korea and Czechia, capturing soil moisture, photosynthesis, sun exposure and local climate in real time. A bespoke chain of large language models mapped that data to emotional states — scarcity, abundance, stress, comfort — and drafted first-person dispatches, as if the tree were a journalist reporting from the front line of its own ecosystem.

Human editorial oversight kept the work credible: a journalist editor, ecological advisors from Biomimicry 3.8, and FCB's team fact-checked and tuned each article, balancing scientific accuracy with emotional resonance. To avoid blurring journalism and fiction during a press trust crisis, the project published its methodology and linked every claim in each tree's report to its source, inviting readers to inspect how the narratives were built.

The campaign was viewed more than 86 million times on YouTube, and at Cannes Lions 2025 it won two Gold Lions and one Silver Lion in Digital Craft — alongside Hyundai's 'Night Fishing' Grand Prix — followed by a Grand LIA and multiple Golds at the London International Awards. A second round of dispatches from a Czech Silver Fir, a Brazilian Juçara Palm and a Korean Tulip Tree launched in July 2025, extending the idea into an ongoing editorial program.