The San Francisco Bay Area is pretty environmentally conscious. Nowhere else in the country do more people recycle, compost, bring their bags to the store, conserve water, buy organic, wear natural fibers, eat with dietary restrictions, use clean energy, reuse coffee cups, outlaw straws! Yes, people in the Bay Area do a lot. But do they really?

Division of Labor has been an ad agency in San Francisco for well over a decade. We’ve seen the behaviors of consumers as they relate to a variety of products; packaged goods, technology, software, entertainment products and more. And while people in San Francisco regularly espouse views in favor of environmental action, their actions may not be as consequential as they think.

Division of Labor works with a lot of startups, something you might expect from an ad agency in San Francisco, but much of the work we do deals with behavior change. Things like, switching from regular TV to streaming, moving from servers to cloud storage, going from passwords to a passwordless internet; all these behavior changes are things we confronted in campaigns for different startup clients that had a pretty big impact on how people live their lives.

So what was the behavior change in this case? 

The biggest thing a person can do for the environment is switch to an electric car. Recycling is great, organic is wonderful, and composting is lovely, but driving a gas-powered car does more to affect climate change than anything. But it’s a huge behavior shift. It’s more expensive, it’s disruptive, there’s range anxiety, it’s new! We had to convince people who are already pretty environmentally conscious, to make this rather big change.

Give them credit for all the small things they do and then encourage them to step it up. As an advertising agency in San Francisco, we’ve seen a lot of the guilt and blame game. Make people feel bad, show the destruction, pull on their heartstrings, enough! People work hard around here trying to do what’s right. We need to give them the credit they deserve, and then push them to do more.

This campaign for Drive Clean Bay Area ran only in social media. It had a very small spend behind it. But the campaign directly sold 1.5 electric cars every single day it ran, for a cost of around $86 per car. Think about that; we sold a car and a half a day and spent around $86 for each car we sold. Any car salesperson would give a customer $86 from their own pocket to get a sale. 

Besides the campaign getting people interested, we pushed people to a microsite that allowed them to buy an EV at a discount as part of a group purchase. So they saved a few bucks AND did their environmental good deed.