To The Last Tree Standing
View the case- Brand
- Bialowieza
- Year
- 2017
- Objective
- Awareness
- Industry
- Other
- Mechanic
- Adventure & Quest
- Platform
- In-Game
- Agency
- Ogilvy & Mather Poland
- With
- Tytus Klepacz
- With
- Wojciech Kowalik
Objective
Logging in the Białowieża Forest had become a polarized political fight, and Greenpeace Poland found young Poles — old enough to sign a petition but shut out of the debate — checked out of it entirely. The goal was to pull the issue out of partisan politics and put it in front of that audience on its own terms, in the game where they already spent their time.
Solution
Players join a public Minecraft server (or download the map to run on their own) and land inside a 1:1 recreation of the Białowieża Forest — about 700 km² built from over 50 billion blocks and roughly 7 million trees across 40 species. From there it's an open walk through rivers, bogs, and clearings, with five lookout points reproducing real locations, including the edge of the forest's strictly protected core zone and a watchtower over the Narewka. Streamers and YouTubers led their own audiences through the map alongside a narrated film and a companion documentary. It all built to one live broadcast where viewers logged on to a forest already clear-cut, and spent the stream combing the empty map for the single tree left standing.
Results
The petition to expand the Białowieża National Park drew 170,000 signatures, more than 10x the 16,000 target (20,000+ in the main campaign phase alone). Campaign videos reached 514,658 organic views at a 5.6% engagement rate, and the finale stream drew nearly 130,000 organic views with a peak of 9,700 concurrent viewers. Total watch time hit 2,954,510 minutes (about 5.6 years), and the campaign generated 1.57 million PLN in earned media within a month against a 1.2 million PLN goal, reaching an estimated 80 million people worldwide.
- 1
Players discover the campaign through Polish Minecraft creators' videos and streams or press coverage, then find the campaign site with instructions for entering a virtual reconstruction of the Białowieża Forest.
- 2
Entry requires only a copy of Minecraft: players either connect directly to the campaign's public multiplayer server, or download the full map file and run it on their own server or in single-player.
- 3
Once inside, players walk freely across a 1:1-scale recreation of the forest, roughly 700 square kilometers built from over 50 billion blocks.
- 4
The core loop is open exploration: players distinguish among 40 recreated tree species across some 6–7 million trees, come across rivers, streams, lakes and bogs modeled on satellite topography, and can reach five viewpoints matching real locations in the forest, including the entrance to its strictly protected zone.
- 5
The world is fully editable and treated as a shared space, so players can chop down any tree they find, same as in any Minecraft map.
- 6
In a later phase, the same forest reappears clear-cut down to a single standing tree, and players take part in a public, collective search to find it, led by streamer Gimper and his audience combing the barren landscape live on Twitch.
- 7
Once the last tree is located and touched, the entire forest regenerates back to its original state.
- 8
Players are then directed off-platform to sign a petition expanding the real Białowieża National Park and to support volunteer patrols that document illegal logging.
