I've been meaning to write about these videos for some time but somehow it never seemed the right moment (and all our Woolworths work kept getting in the way), so apologies if you've already seen them elsewhere. Yet in the lull after the hard launch of our light bulbs campaign, it's worth pointing out that it's not just in the UK that a shift to energy-efficient bulbs is being sought.
Our colleagues at Greenpeace India have also launched a Ban the Bulb campaign, demanding that their government phase out incandescent bulbs by 2010 and to do that, they aim to get one million signatures on their petition by the end of the year (and you don't have to be an Indian resident to sign it). Ambitious, but if a country with over a billion people switched off those inefficient bulbs, the emissions savings would be phenomenal - 55 million tonnes, to be precise.
By his own admission, Gene (communications director of the Indian office) was stumped as to how to get the campaign message out in a creative and eye-catching fashion when he got a call from a film-maker called Stealth (real name: Vinod Eshawr) offering him some ideas and asking for some money. Gene didn't have the money, but Stealth went and made them anyway. They look something like this:
The other two videos feature Einstein and Newton - very simple, very effective and I wish I'd thought of them. Stealth didn't make them on his own, and I'm obliged to mention Nitisha Kapur, Jeeva Rekha, Senthil Kumar, N Ramesh and Baadal as co-conspirators. But as far as I know, they had nothing to do with this, which Greenpeace India are also using to get the climate change message across. It's not exactly seasonal, but then lately the weather hasn't been either.
