NETFLIX: OUR PLANET

The Travel Show Problem

Our Planet was a genuine landmark. It was Attenborough's first series for Netflix, a striking departure for a man whose voice had been synonymous with the BBC for the better part of seventy years. It was nine and a half years in the making, more than 3,500 days of filming across 50 countries, with over 600 crew shooting on the latest 4K camera technology. Eight episodes: Frozen Worlds, Jungles, Coastal Seas, From Deserts to Grasslands, The High Seas, Fresh Water, Forests. And unlike the wonder-for-wonder's-sake tradition it came from, this one had a thesis: that we are losing all of this, fast, and that the losing is our doing.

So when we sat down with audiences in the region, the dominant response should have worried Attenborough more than it worried us; people watched it like a travel show.

This wasn't carelessness on their part, but rather how the genre has trained us to consume this content. A nature documentary works by making a place irresistible; the magic and the wonder and the strangeness of somewhere you've never been. And the natural, almost automatic next thought is I want to go there. The mystical far-off place becomes a destination and the endangered jungle becomes a line on a bucket list. The whole grammar of the form points toward the airport.

You don't even have to take my word for it. The series' own conservation ecosystem demonstrated the gravitational pull. Tour operators built Our Planet safaris off the back of it; the Serengeti migration from one episode, the desert elephants from another, the "Wilds of Borneo" from a third, all quietly repackaged as itineraries. The wonder was being converted into footfall almost in real time. which is precisely the danger of the entire enterprise.

Make no mistake; tourism is one of the heaviest pressures on the ecosystems the series was begging us to protect. A documentary made to slow our impact on the natural world was, through no fault of its own, generating a fresh wave of it. In a very real sense, the form was working against the content and the medium was undermining the message.

I thought that was a problem that was worth naming out loud, and frankly it's a responsibility that sits squarely with the brands putting these documentaries out: a nature film should not become an advert for the very tourism that endangers what it films.

The False Promise Of Nature Documentaries

The thing people imagine when they picture "going to see the orangutans" is, frankly, a let-down. You travel for a day then sit in humidity for hours and then get a distant, partial, fortunate glimpse of an animal that mostly wants nothing to do with you. And that's the realistic best case! It's a meaningful disturbance to the animal for a deeply mediocre human experience.

Now set that against what the Our Planet team did. Nine and a half years of crews camping for weeks in insect-plagued Sumatran swamps, waiting. A baby orangutan and her mother, named Eden and Ellie by the researchers, followed long enough to capture how a mother passes down a mental map of the forest; how she teaches her daughter to fish ants from a tree hole and find the fruiting trees. A carnivorous pitcher plant in Borneo, only formally described in 2015, filmed for the first time. This is not a glimpse. It is years of patience distilled into minutes of something no tourist will ever, ever see.

The comparison isn't even close. I don't care how good your camera is or how good your photography skills, your holiday snap of a smudge in a distant canopy is not a lesser version of what Attenborough captured; it's a different category of thing entirely. The documentary doesn't whet an appetite that a trip can satisfy. The documentary is the satisfaction, rendered more completely than presence ever could.

Which gave us a useful, if slightly mischievous truth to work with: you don't need to go. You couldn't do better if you went. You'd only do harm by going.

The Campaign: We Wish You Weren't Here

The line played on the most worn-out cliché in travel; the postcard, the holiday show, Wish You Were Here; and turned it inside out.

The campaign ran in two movements.

The first was confrontational, and deliberately so. It planted a flag: this is a nature documentary, not a travel show. If you care about these places as much as we do, please don't come to them. The most loving thing you can do for Borneo, for Sumatra, for these reefs and forests, is to stay away and let them be. We weren't softening the conservation message into aspiration. We were refusing the genre's default invitation and saying the quiet part loudly.

The second movement removed the excuse. And anyway, you don't need to come. We have already captured everything you could possibly hope to see, more beautifully than you ever could, after nearly a decade of trying. Your holiday snaps will never come close to what Attenborough's team brought back. By showing up, you're doing more harm than good; and you're not even getting the better view. It reframed staying home not as missing out, but as both the responsible choice and the superior one.

The cheek of it mattered. A purely earnest "please protect nature" message gets nodded at and scrolled past. Telling someone their orangutan selfie is rubbish compared to the real thing, that they should put the holiday down because the film already did it better; that gets remembered, shared, argued about. The provocation was the delivery mechanism for the conservation point, not a distraction from it.

Bringing It Home in the Markets

A campaign like this can't only live in the realm of clever anti-advertising. The other half of the work was using the show, locally, to do the conservation job it was made for, in the places it was made about.

This is where the regional partnerships became the real proof. From 20 June 2020, Our Planet aired on the Indonesian network TVRI as part of the Belajar dari Rumah (Study from Home) block, made possible by a partnership between Indonesia's Ministry of Education and Culture and Netflix during the pandemic school closures. It was the first time a Netflix original documentary series had ever been broadcast on conventional television; pulled out of the subscription walled garden and onto the public airwaves, into classrooms-by-proxy across the archipelago.

That move is the antidote to the travel-show problem in its purest form. Instead of the series functioning as a glossy brochure for foreign visitors to come and look at Indonesia's jungles, it became a tool for Indonesian children to understand and value the ecosystems on their own doorstep; to grow up seeing the orangutan and the rainforest not as a tourist attraction but as something theirs to protect. The same footage, pointed in the opposite direction. Outward, it sells flights. Inward, it builds custodians.

The Bigger Picture

What I keep returning to from this one is the responsibility that comes with making something beautiful about a fragile place.

Beauty is persuasive, and persuasion has a direction. A nature documentary can make you want to protect a place, or it can make you want to possess it, photograph it, stand in it; and most of the genre, by long habit, nudges toward the second. The wonder gets monetised as wanderlust. The conservation film quietly becomes a sales tool for the very pressure it warns against.

The work for Our Planet was an argument that you can refuse that default. That a brand putting out work like this owes it to the subject not to let the film become an advert for its own destruction. And that, handled with enough nerve, the most pro-conservation thing a campaign can say is also the most counterintuitive: we made this so beautifully that you never have to go; and because we love these places, we'd genuinely rather you didn't.

We wish you weren't here. Stay home. Watch. Then protect what you've seen from a distance, which is the only place most of it was ever meant to be seen from anyway.

This campaign was developed for the APAC launch of Netflix's Our Planet in 2019, with regional broadcast and education partnerships extending into 2020.