Smithsonian and DDB New York launch ‘Endangered Song’ social campaign to try to save Sumatran tigers

There are only 400 Sumatran tigers left so the Smithsonian National Zoological Park and Conservation Biology Institute is launching a campaign through DDB New York to highlight their plight.

DDB has devised the ‘Endangered Song’ project, 400 degradable records featuring a song by Portugal The Man which will become extinct (there are no digital copies) unless people share it and digitize it themselves.

The campaign was launched yesterday (Earth Day) and already there’ve been over 24,000 YouTube hits so it looks as though the record will survive, if not necessarily the unfortunate tigers.

Anyway it’s an ingenious campaign and deserves to succeed for lots of reasons. Adland is putting on rather a good performance for endangered species at the moment; last week we had two WPP agencies produce an outstanding ‘selfies’ campaign for the World Wildlife Fund.