#1321 2024 · WWF-Korea with Cheil Worldwide and travel-booking app Yanolja · Conservation / travel hospitality / advertising
List the endangered animal's habitat itself as a bookable stay on the hotel app, so the booking act is the donation
the problem
Young Koreans scroll past conservation appeals they do not trust; a charity needs donations built into an act they already perform
background
WWF Korea faced the classic nonprofit wall: the audience it most needed — young travellers — was younger, more ad-blind and less moved by rescue-animal imagery than any older generation, and traditional awareness campaigns produced at best passive sympathy, at worst dismissal. The obvious steps all required changing minds first: an emotional film, a celebrity endorsement, a donation button that asked users to leave the app and click through a payment flow.
Every one of those poured effort into trying to persuade a distracted user to care more, converting attention into goodwill and hoping the goodwill later converts into cash. The barrier was the ask itself: donation is a separate, effortful act, so the drop-off sat between caring and giving.
what everyone would do
The standard nonprofit playbook was all on the table and all of it stalls on the ask: produce an emotional awareness film and hope it converts to giving; get a celebrity to lend a face; or add a donation button that forces a user to abandon the booking flow, open a payment page and type an amount. Every path treats donation as a separate, effortful decision event, so the user with even partial sympathy still does nothing.
what they saw
You do not need to make users care first; just put the give where they already choose. WWF listed the endangered habitat as a bookable room, so the app's own trusted booking act carried the donation — no new ask.
the move
WWF Korea listed the natural habitats of five endangered Korean animals — the black woodpecker, Asiatic black bear, otter, loggerhead turtle and honeybee — as genuine bookable rooms on the Yanolja travel-booking app. When a user searched for a stay, the endangered animal's home appeared among the search results as a host. Booking it carried a 'stay' fee of 2,820 won — one won per Korean endangered species — which was in fact a donation to conservation. The user's normal act of asking the app for somewhere to stay now produced the give.
why it works
The mechanism borrows the trust and motion of a transaction the user already performs instead of creating a new one that frictionally competes. Because the habitat appears mid-search as a normal listing, the user takes the natural next step — open it, see whose home it is, book it — and in doing that habitual act, makes a payment that is a donation. There is no separate 'donate' click to bounce off, so the giving inherits the platform's high completion rate rather than a campaign's low one. The symbolic price (2,820 won = one per endangered species) turns the amount into a comprehension test of the problem, and because it mimics an ordinary stay price it feels like a purchase of a place, not charity, which removes the moral burden that usually suppresses the ask. Distribution is free: the app's existing search results place the cause in front of the exact young audience the ads failed to reach.
the payoff
Won Silver Lion in Creative Strategy at Cannes 2025, an independent jury's verdict. Reach figures are the campaign's own disclosures.
where it breaks
The move only works where the host platform already has a habitual, trusted 'get me a place' transaction — it does not create one, so a platform users only faintly associate with bookings will simply send them to the same low engagement as a banner. The 'book the thing you protect' logic needs the beneficiary to be semantically a 'place' worth booking, and the symbolic price to feel fair as a stay; if the price reads as a charitable surcharge rather than a room fee, the buying frame collapses back into a donation ask and the friction returns. It also assumes the user finding the listing already intends to book something; where the platform is not being used for its core purpose, the placing does nothing. And because the outcome figures are the campaign's own disclosures, the case proves the mechanism but not, from independent evidence, the revenue lift.
what came after
The move showed how a market intermediary's native transaction can be repurposed as a giving mechanism without adding any new ask: five habitat listings, one symbolic price, and the platform's existing search engine did the distributing.
references
- [1]LBBOnline — WWF-Korea launches ANISTAY campaign to protect the homes of endangered wildlifeLBBOnline (independent ad-industry trade press), 2024lbbonline.com
- [2]Marketing Report — WWF-Korea launches campaign to protect the homes of endangered wildlifeMarketing Report (independent trade press), 2024marketingreport.one
- [3]WARC (award-group case record) — WWF Korea: Ani StayWARC (part of LIONS / Cannes), 2025warc.com