Stop Ivory's Going Going Gone, created by JWT London in April 2018, used a 95-second cinema film to pressure the UK government to convert its ivory-trade ban
How Stop Ivory's Going Going Gone Confronted the UK's Ivory Trade
Stop Ivory's Going Going Gone is a 95-second public service film created by JWT London and released in the United Kingdom in April 2018, designed to pressure the UK government to convert its proposed ivory-trade restrictions into enforceable law by dramatising the human act of purchasing ivory as an act of violence against elephants.
The campaign centres on a single, controlled scenario: an auction house. Bidders compete in a setting that reads as entirely legitimate — the trappings of the fine-art and antiques trade, complete with a composed auctioneer and an attentive room. The moment the gavel falls and a buyer secures their ivory lot, a gunshot rings out and blood appears on the buyer's face. The causal link between the transaction and the killing of an elephant is made immediate, visceral and inescapable. The creative mechanism converts an abstract legal and ethical argument into a felt experience, collapsing the comfortable distance between the auction room and the killing field.
JWT London distributed Going Going Gone through cinema and online channels in the United Kingdom, positioning the film where it could reach both general audiences and the culturally influential demographics most likely to engage with luxury goods markets. The campaign was classified within the Public Interest category and pursued a dual objective: to expose the continued reality of illegal ivory trading and to generate public pressure sufficient to move the UK government toward legislative action. As reported by The Drum in its coverage published on 28 April 2018, the campaign explicitly called for the conversion of proposed restrictions into law. The Clapboard Score for Going Going Gone stands at 63 out of 100, reflecting a campaign that executes its creative concept with precision while operating within a relatively contained media footprint.
Stop Ivory directed the campaign's pressure toward a specific governmental decision rather than broad public education. This strategic distinction separates Going Going Gone from conventional conservation advertising. Rather than asking audiences to feel concern about elephants in the abstract, JWT London anchored the film to a concrete, achievable policy outcome: the enactment of the United Kingdom's ivory-trade ban as binding law.
The strategic insight driving the creative is that the ivory trade sustains itself partly through the perceived legitimacy of established auction markets. In the United Kingdom, the antiques trade has historically maintained exemptions from ivory-sale restrictions, a position that organisations including the Environmental Investigation Agency have documented as a significant loophole exploited by illegal traffickers. By setting the film inside an auction house, JWT London attacked the very institutional context that lent the trade its respectability. The creative did not position ivory buyers as distant criminals but as ordinary participants in a familiar commercial ritual — making the moral indictment harder to deflect.
The African Wildlife Foundation has documented that elephant populations face sustained pressure from poaching driven by demand in luxury goods markets, with the ivory trade remaining one of the primary threats to wild elephant survival across Africa. In the United Kingdom, advocacy organisations including Stop Ivory and the Environmental Investigation Agency had been pressing for stronger domestic legislation ahead of the government's 2018 ivory ban consultations. Competitors in the conservation communications space — including WWF UK and the Born Free Foundation — had pursued awareness-led campaigns in the same period, but Going Going Gone distinguished itself by subordinating emotional appeal to legislative specificity, making the call to action a direct demand on government rather than a request for individual behaviour change.
James Lawes directed Going Going Gone for production company Snapper Films. The film's effectiveness rests almost entirely on the restraint of its construction: a composed, realistic auction environment that offers no visual signals of what is about to occur, followed by a single moment of shocking consequence. The creative architecture denies the audience the protective distance of metaphor — there is no CGI elephant, no savanna landscape, no documentary footage. The violence arrives inside a room the viewer recognises.
Executive Creative Director Lucas Peon oversaw the campaign at JWT London, with Creative Directors David Masterman and Cristiano Neves leading the creative development. Creatives Will Wright and James Lucking are credited with the campaign concept. The decision to build the entire argument around a single narrative device — the auction — reflects a discipline that is rare in cause-led advertising, where the impulse to include every dimension of an issue frequently dilutes the force of the central idea.
Tash Bedford is credited among the production personnel associated with the campaign. The 95-second runtime is itself a considered choice: long enough to establish the auction's social texture and allow genuine tension to build, short enough to function within a cinema pre-roll context without losing audience attention. The sound design carries significant weight. The ambient noise of a bidding room, the auctioneer's cadences, and then the abrupt acoustic violence of the gunshot do the work that a longer film might have distributed across multiple scenes. As reported by The Drum, the blood on the buyer's face at the moment of purchase was the image the campaign used to make its point to the press and to the public — a visual that is difficult to dismiss or rationalise away.
No independently verified performance data for Going Going Gone across paid media or public engagement is publicly available beyond one reported reach figure. According to a WPP case study, the campaign reached 30,500 people in March 2018, though the methodology behind this figure — whether it reflects unique individuals, impressions, or event participants — is not specified in available documentation.
The legislative context provides the most meaningful measure of the campaign's environment. The United Kingdom's Ivory Act received Royal Assent in December 2018, following months of sustained advocacy from organisations including Stop Ivory. While no causal attribution between Going Going Gone and the Act's passage can be established from public records, the campaign was deployed at a moment of active parliamentary debate, and its explicit objective — to pressure the government toward legislation — aligned with an outcome that subsequently occurred.
The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects a campaign that achieves genuine creative distinction within a constrained format. The single-asset structure and the specificity of the distribution strategy — cinema and online in the United Kingdom — suggest a campaign designed for cultural impact rather than mass reach. Going Going Gone demonstrates the structural logic of cause-led creative: when the call to action is addressed to government rather than to a consumer, reach metrics become secondary to the quality and placement of the impression. The film's restraint and its refusal to aestheticise suffering represent a considered approach to a category in which emotional manipulation is a persistent risk.
Going Going Gone is a 95-second public service film created by JWT London for Stop Ivory, published in the United Kingdom in April 2018. The film depicts an ivory auction ending with a gunshot and blood on the buyer's face, connecting the act of purchase directly to elephant poaching and calling on the UK government to enact its proposed ivory-trade ban as law.
JWT London created Going Going Gone for Stop Ivory in 2018. Executive Creative Director Lucas Peon led the agency team, with Creative Directors David Masterman and Cristiano Neves and creatives Will Wright and James Lucking developing the concept. Director James Lawes and production company Snapper Films produced the 95-second film for cinema and online distribution in the United Kingdom.
The campaign aimed to pressure the UK government to convert proposed ivory-trade restrictions into binding law. As reported by The Drum in April 2018, Stop Ivory used the film to expose continuing illegal ivory trading and to generate public and political pressure at a moment when UK ivory legislation was under active parliamentary consideration.
JWT London distributed the 95-second film through cinema and online channels in the United Kingdom following its April 2018 publication. The dual-channel strategy placed the film where it could reach general audiences and demographics connected to luxury goods markets, the primary consumer base the campaign sought to implicate in the ivory trade's continuing existence.
According to a WPP case study, the campaign reached 30,500 people in March 2018, though the precise methodology is not publicly specified. The United Kingdom's Ivory Act received Royal Assent in December 2018, the legislative outcome Stop Ivory had campaigned for, though direct attribution between the film and the Act's passage cannot be established from available public records.
Going Going Gone holds a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100. This reflects a campaign that executes its central creative concept with discipline and restraint, deploying a single-asset film to achieve cultural and legislative relevance in the United Kingdom, while operating within a contained media footprint that limits its score relative to campaigns with broader documented reach and measurable outcomes.
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