Case Teardown is a weekly look at award-winning campaigns and the thinking behind them. Each week, we go beyond the case study to unpack the tension, creative choices, and people that made the work work.
Don't Choose Extinction
Silver Honor in Environment & Sustainability, 8th Annual Shorty Impact Awards
Campaigns often have a built-in expiration date. A launch creates a spike, media coverage follows, social engagement climbs, and then the conversation moves on.
For organizations working on long-term issues, that's a problem. Climate change doesn't have a campaign cycle, but audiences do.
The bigger creative challenge becomes: How do you turn a moment into something people want to keep following?
For the UNDP and Social Revolt Agency, the answer was a dinosaur.
The tension: What happens after the viral moment?
The original #DontChooseExtinction campaign had already captured global attention with Frankie, an animated dinosaur who delivered a speech at the United Nations about fossil fuel subsidies.
But viral attention has a shelf life.
Rather than simply create another piece of content, the team turned Frankie into an ongoing character with somewhere to go, something to say, and a reason for people to keep watching.
The creative heist: Turn the campaign into a character
The strategic move was unusually physical: bring Frankie to life.
A realistic, life-sized dinosaur puppet took the campaign out of the screen and into the real world.
Frankie appeared at Climate Week NYC, Cannes Lions, COP27, the World Economic Forum and Earth Week, but the activations weren't limited to stages and official events.
He marched through city streets. He visited schools. He appeared on television. He danced with youth leaders. He posed for selfies. He showed up wherever a giant dinosaur could reasonably disrupt the day.
Watch the campaign:
That gave the campaign something most social-first work struggles to manufacture: a physical reason to create content.
Every appearance generated another photo, video, interaction or media story. The live team could capture and publish content in real time, while Frankie’s social channels continued developing his personality and identity.
The character became the media strategy.
Our Takeaway?
The lesson isn't to turn every campaign into a mascot (although that’d be fun!). It's to think beyond the launch.
Frankie gave the #DontChooseExtinction campaign a recognizable face, a physical presence and an endless supply of moments to capture and share.
Instead of asking, What should we post next? The team created something that could become the next post.
