The archive · PR & Stunts · Marketing decision · 2021
Justdiggit's Mars Can Wait fakes a Mars photo from Earth to hijack the landing hype
During the Mars landing hype, Justdiggit spread an image of its own land that looks like Mars, then revealed it was Earth: Mars can wait, Earth cannot.
Justdiggit
What it had to solve
Justdiggit is a small NGO with a practical climate fix — digging holes in barren land, filling them with water and letting vegetation return in as little as three months, cooling the ground by three to four degrees — but its voice was not being heard while the world fixated on the mission to Mars.
How it works
Justdiggit is a small NGO whose practical solution is digging: holes in barren land, filled with water, let vegetation return in as little as three months and trees within a few years, while lowering local temperatures by three to four degrees. But nobody was hearing the message while the world fixated on the mission to Mars.
So Justdiggit hacked the event. During the Mars-landing frenzy it spread an aerial image of one of its own work sites — ground that looks exactly like Mars — and let people believe it showed the red planet.
Once the 'Mars' picture was travelling across the internet, the NGO revealed the truth: the land was Earth, and its digging method was already bringing such ground back to life. The work is preserved in the D&AD awards archive.
Why it lands
- Mars had captured every headline, while a proven climate fix on Earth went unheard — so the NGO made the landing itself its distribution channel.
- A photo that looks exactly like Mars lets the internet spread the story before the reveal does the teaching.
- The reveal turns a fake Mars sighting into proof that degraded land can be regreened — hope instead of a lecture.
- An NGO with almost no media budget reaches global fame because the story itself, not paid placement, travels.
What it did
The D&AD record says the hack helped Justdiggit reach global fame, and credits the NGO's work with regenerating more than three million trees.
What you can take
Borrow the biggest story in the news by becoming it: let the audience believe your decoy for a day, then flip the reveal back to the problem you actually solve.
Since then
The stunt rode the Perseverance landing in February 2021, when the 'Mars' image travelled the world before Justdiggit revealed it was Earth. The D&AD archive files the work as the moment the NGO reached global fame and links it to more than three million trees regenerated; no independent reach figures are published on the page.
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