WWF Poland Turns a Climate Report Into a Hip-Hop Album
WWF Poland's "6th Extinction" campaign transforms a dense scientific report on species loss into a hip-hop album performed by Polish artists, using music and experiential activation to reach audiences in Poland who might never engage with formal environmental policy documents.
Published in Poland in March 2019 and created by McCann Worldgroup's Warsaw office in partnership with Outrage Agency and MELT, the campaign takes its conceptual foundation from WWF's climate report "2050 Poland for Generations" — a document prepared over two years by twenty subject-matter experts, as documented on the campaign's Behance case published in June 2019. The report examined the economic, social, and environmental consequences of a business-as-usual approach to climate policy across a thirty-year horizon. Rather than amplifying the report through conventional press or display advertising, McCann reframed its findings as song lyrics, commissioning Polish hip-hop duo PRO8L3M — identified across campaign documentation as popular with the target demographic — to perform the resulting album, also titled "6th Extinction," or "VI Katastrofa" in Polish.
The campaign's experiential dimension extended the music into physical space. In Poland, an activation drew approximately 4,000 visitors over five days, according to adruby.com. The format is classified by both the agency and archival sources including adsoftheworld.com as an experiential, public-interest NGO campaign rather than a product or commercial activation. Creative direction was led by Bartek Klimaszewski and Marcin Sosiński of McCann Worldgroup Warsaw. The campaign earned a shortlist at Golden Drum 2019 in the Craft — Best Use of Music category, with the award period falling in October 2019, as recorded by goldendrum.com.
Polish public audiences in 2019 presented a specific communication challenge for environmental NGOs. Scientific reports on biodiversity loss and climate trajectory, however rigorously produced, rarely penetrate youth-oriented media environments without significant creative translation. McCann Worldgroup's strategic insight for WWF Poland was direct: the findings of "2050 Poland for Generations" needed a cultural vehicle that matched the attention habits of the audience the organisation most needed to move.
Hip-hop provided that vehicle. PRO8L3M, the Polish duo selected to perform the album, carried existing credibility with younger Polish audiences, making the campaign's message legible within a genre framework that listeners already trusted. This approach positioned WWF Poland's work differently from competitor environmental communications in the Polish market, where organisations such as Greenpeace Poland have historically relied on visual spectacle and petition mechanics rather than music-led experiential formats. By embedding verified scientific language — drawn directly from the expert-authored report — into lyrics, the campaign preserved intellectual integrity while radically lowering the barrier to engagement.
The strategic architecture also served a fundraising and awareness dual mandate common to NGO campaigns. In a comparable European market, WWF's "Stop the Plastic Flood" campaign in Germany, which ran from November 2018 to February 2019, raised the equivalent of approximately 1.6 million euros in donations during its campaign window, as reported by dentsu-ho.com, demonstrating the potential commercial and awareness upside of inventive NGO formats. In Poland, "6th Extinction" pursued reach at scale rather than direct response, a choice reflected in its reported social media footprint of more than 27 million across platforms, as documented by adruby.com.
Creative direction on "6th Extinction" was handled by Bartek Klimaszewski and Marcin Sosiński at McCann Worldgroup Warsaw. The production extended across multiple disciplines, reflecting the campaign's hybrid music-experiential format and the involvement of partner agencies Outrage Agency and MELT alongside the lead agency team.
Art direction was credited to Janina Szwykowska and Bartosz Włodarczyk, with copywriting responsibilities distributed across Łukasz Kołakowski, Zbigniew Marczak, Małgorzata Garapich-Nowicka, and Natalia Karawajczyk, as documented in campaign credits published on adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com. The motion design work was executed by Vladyslav "Vladi" Kravets and Małgorzata Wojtkowiak. Post-production at McCann Warsaw was led by Rafał Jastrzębski and Vladi Kravets.
The creative process began with the source material: WWF's "2050 Poland for Generations" report, prepared by twenty experts over two years, as noted in the Behance case published June 2019. McCann's copywriting team extracted and adapted the report's findings into lyrics that PRO8L3M then performed, a process that required the scientific data to survive translation into a genre where rhythm and emotional resonance are structural requirements. The experiential activation in Poland extended this into a physical installation format, drawing some 4,000 visitors over five days according to adruby.com. The campaign also incorporated visual production assets — the Behance case documents one media asset — with motion design work supporting the experiential and digital components. The album titled "6th Extinction" functioned as a standalone cultural object, accumulating approximately 1 million plays within its first twenty-four hours of release, as reported by adruby.com, validating the production quality as sufficient to drive organic consumption independent of the NGO context.
No independently audited third-party performance verification for the "6th Extinction" campaign is publicly available in the standard sense applied to commercial advertising effectiveness studies. The figures that exist are drawn from campaign documentation published on adruby.com and the Behance case study, and should be read in that context.
Within those documented parameters, the scale reported is notable for a public-interest campaign operating in the Polish market. Adruby.com records a social media reach exceeding 27 million, approximately 1 million plays of the album within the first twenty-four hours of release, and roughly 4,000 visitors to the physical experiential activation across its five-day run in Poland. The campaign's shortlisting at Golden Drum 2019 in the Craft — Best Use of Music category, confirmed by goldendrum.com, provides a third-party creative quality signal independent of self-reported reach figures.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness case rests on format innovation. Converting a technical climate report into a consumed cultural product — one that generated a million plays in a day — demonstrates that the strategic translation from document to lyric succeeded on its own terms. For an NGO operating without the paid media budgets available to commercial advertisers, earned reach of this scale in Poland represents a meaningful outcome. Clapboard rates "6th Extinction" at 67 out of 100, recognising the strength of its conceptual ambition and its shortlist recognition at Golden Drum while noting the absence of independently verified downstream impact data connecting reach to behavioural or policy outcomes for WWF Poland.
WWF's "6th Extinction" is a March 2019 experiential campaign created by McCann Worldgroup Warsaw for WWF Poland. It converted the climate report "2050 Poland for Generations," prepared by twenty experts over two years, into a hip-hop album performed by Polish duo PRO8L3M, reaching a reported 27 million people on social media, per adruby.com.
McCann Worldgroup's Warsaw office led the campaign. Partner agencies Outrage Agency and MELT also contributed. Creative directors Bartek Klimaszewski and Marcin Sosiński headed the creative team, with art direction by Janina Szwykowska and Bartosz Włodarczyk, as documented on adsoftheworld.com and clapboard.com.
Polish hip-hop duo PRO8L3M performed the album titled "6th Extinction." The duo was selected because of their existing popularity with the campaign's target audience in Poland. Their performance of lyrics adapted from WWF's climate report generated approximately 1 million plays within the first twenty-four hours of release, according to adruby.com.
"6th Extinction" received a shortlist nomination at Golden Drum 2019 in the Craft — Best Use of Music category. The award period was October 2019, as confirmed by goldendrum.com. The shortlist recognition serves as an independent creative quality signal for this WWF Poland campaign created by McCann Worldgroup.
McCann based the campaign on WWF's report "2050 Poland for Generations," which examined the environmental, economic, and social consequences of inaction over thirty years. The report was prepared by twenty subject-matter experts over two years, as documented in the Behance case study published June 2019.
According to adruby.com, the campaign achieved a reported social media reach of more than 27 million, approximately 1 million album plays within twenty-four hours of release, and around 4,000 visitors to its physical experiential activation in Poland over five days. No independently audited third-party verification of these figures is publicly available.
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