Ogilvy Hong Kong Outs Litterbugs with DNA

Posted on by Patty Odell

Like most people, I really dislike litterbugs. I see them all the time driving around New York: a cigarette butt out the window here. A coffee cup flung out the window there. A bag of garbage strew along the side of the highway. I really don’t know what people are thinking.

What I do like however, is what Ogilvy & Mather Hong Kong is doing. It launched a citywide campaign for the Hong Kong CleanUp Initiative to raise awareness about the staggering 16,000 tons of waste dumped across that city every day. But the best part? The agency is experimenting with DNA to profile those responsible for the mess and to encourage people to change their behavior.

The Face of Litter
Cigarette butts, condoms and coffee cups are some of the items collected for analysis.

“The Face of Litter” uses science to analyze and create DNA-based composites of the perpetrators based on garbage collected in key locations so they will have a good idea what these people look like.

Poster portraits of perpetrators will be placed across the city as well as online to discourage littering. A video demonstrates the experiment and warns people not to litter at the risk of becoming the next face of the campaign.

“Sadly, we suffer from a serious ‘pick up after me’ mentality, and this simply must change,” Rafael Guida, cxecutive creative director OgilvyOne Hong Kong, says. “While this method may not identify specific individuals, it will be enough to make people think twice about littering. The campaign combines a public service message with science and technology, enabling us to communicate with Hongkongers in a very different way.”

A public service poster for "The Face of Litter" campaign.
A public service poster for “The Face of Litter” campaign.

Ogilvy says that by combining the expertise of US-based research centers and advanced Snapshot DNA phenotyping provided by Parabon NanoLabs, the data has been used to create a visual representation of the person who has littered. Because age is impossible to determine through DNA alone, but still integral in creating an accurate portrait, DNA data has been combined with other factors, such as demographics based on the type of litter and where it was collected to determine the approximate age of the litterer.

The campaign is organized by Ecozine and The Nature Conservancy and launched in conjunction with Global Earth Day.

Hey Ogilvy over here in the U.S.— How about launching ‘The Face of Litter—U.S.?” We need it!

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