The archive · PR & Stunts · Marketing decision · 2022–2023
Natura's Amazon Alive counts felled trees per second until candidates pledge action
Candidates ignored 10,272 km² of lost forest, so Natura's PlenaMata counted trees felled per second — and the candidates pledged to protect the Amazon.
Natura
What it had to solve
In 2022 Brazil was about to elect a president while the Amazon faced its worst deforestation in 15 years — candidates were not talking about the 10,272 km² of rainforest already lost.
How it works
In 2022 Brazil was heading to the polls while the Amazon suffered its worst deforestation in 15 years. Presidential candidates were not talking about it — roughly 10,272 km² of rainforest had already disappeared — and cosmetics brand Natura set out to force the forest into the campaign.
The creative move was a new unit of measurement. Deforestation data was turned into PlenaMata, a monitoring platform that reported the loss as the number of trees cut down per second, giving an abstract crisis an urgent, ticking number.
That number was pushed everywhere the election was watched: shared on Twitter, broadcast in TV commercials placed between presidential debates, and displayed on a panel in front of the government's headquarters.
By making the loss impossible to ignore, the campaign turned forest protection into a question candidates had to answer. Brazilian presidential candidates finally pledged to protect the forest, and the work entered the D&AD awards archive.
Why it lands
- A per-second count converts a statistic into something humans feel as urgency — every second the number grows, another tree is gone.
- Placing the data where the audience already was — Twitter feeds, TV breaks between debates, a panel at the seat of government — put it directly in front of candidates.
- Making forest protection an election question gave an environmental message a deadline and a decision-maker.
- The concrete 10,272 km² figure grounded the campaign in a verifiable loss instead of general anxiety about the Amazon.
What it did
Presidential candidates finally pledged to protect the forest, and the campaign entered the D&AD awards archive as a Digital Marketing case.
What you can take
When a crisis is abstract, change the unit: counting trees per second made a silent 10,272 km² loss feel urgent, and put it inside a moment — an election — where silence became untenable.
Since then
The campaign ran through Brazil's 2022 presidential election and entered the D&AD awards archive as a Digital Marketing case, where its real-time counter remains a reference for turning environmental data into political pressure.
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