The archive · Public & Social · Marketing decision · 2026
IUCN faxes mayors ASCII-art of nature to win Green List sign-ups
BETC sends 6,443 ASCII-art faxes to French town halls — 26% of officials act vs 2.3% for email — winning IUCN two Cannes Lions.
IUCN French Committee · Fujifilm Print
What it had to solve
After French municipal elections, freshly elected officials were flooded with emails, calls and mail. The IUCN French Committee needed them to register local forests, lakes, rivers, mountains and coasts on its Green List of well-managed protected areas — but standard outreach was vanishing into saturated inboxes.
How it works
The IUCN French Committee wanted newly elected mayors to protect local nature by registering forests, lakes, rivers, mountains and coastlines on the IUCN Green List of well-managed protected areas. The obstacle was not the message but the medium: after municipal elections, officials were drowning in emails, phone calls and letters, so conservation appeals were opened, if at all, at near-zero rates.
BETC Paris found an overlooked channel: French town halls are legally required to maintain a working fax line for official correspondence. The agency sent 6,443 faxes — 765 reaching mayors' desks directly — carrying posters built entirely from ASCII characters. The low-resolution, ink-efficient art printed crisply on old machines and made a fax from a conservation body feel like an event. Each artwork carried a QR code leading officials to a dedicated page where they could contact the Green List team.
The physical delivery converted at 26%, more than eleven times the 2.3% of standard email campaigns, with a 39.7x lower carbon footprint than out-of-home advertising. Fujifilm Print was credited as the campaign's print-technology partner, and the work won a Gold Lion in Print and Publishing plus a Silver Lion in Creative B2B at Cannes Lions 2026.
Why it lands
- French law guarantees every town hall a working fax line, so the medium was legally protected from spam fatigue.
- A fax is physical: someone must retrieve the paper, so the message reached a human desk instead of a filter.
- ASCII art turned a technical limitation into a striking, ink-light aesthetic that made biodiversity itself the hero.
- The QR code bridged an analog surprise to a measurable digital action, giving the campaign a conversion pipeline.
What it did
The faxes converted at 26% against 2.3% for standard email outreach, and the campaign's carbon footprint was 39.7x lower than an equivalent outdoor campaign. At Cannes Lions 2026 the work won a Gold Lion in Print and Publishing and a Silver Lion in Creative B2B.
What you can take
Attention is won in the channel people cannot ignore: a fax line French town halls must keep working turned a saturated-inbox problem into a 26%-conversion channel — with the art doing the persuading.
Since then
The launch of the faxes was amplified with a film on the IUCN French Committee's social channels inviting the public to challenge their own elected officials, extending the campaign from 6,443 town halls to a national conversation about protecting natural areas. The two Cannes Lions in June 2026 — Gold in Print and Publishing, Silver in Creative B2B — made The Trojan Fax a reference case for using neglected, legally mandated channels to reach decision-makers.
Sources
- Cannes Lions 2026 : BETC et VML gagnants en Creative B2B
- Print Grand-Prix taken by Rethink Canada
- IUCN: The Trojan Fax — Breakdown
spotted an error? The archive wants to know.
Your turn
You just read one. Describe the brief you are staring at, and see who has been given the same problem.
Free account · 3 free questions · no card