The Wave

In December 2009 Stop Climate Chaos organised the world’s biggest ever climate change march, called The Wave. To publicise the event and to ensure information about The Wave spread widely, I came up with this concept of a video website where people uploaded videos of themselves doing Mexican waves, which scrolled across the screen making it look like a neverending Mexican wave. The core concept of The Wave was the gestalt principle of the ‘whole being more than the sum of it’s parts’, so the site was an attempt to dynamically reflect people coming together for The Wave.

To build the necessary software, I enlisted the help of Torchbox, a web design and software agency who did a fantastic job. We hosted the finished product on Amazon’s speedy ec3 servers to handle the heavy bandwidth of delivering so many videos seamlessly to the site. The site became so popular that we ended up with contributions from all over the world including: Tijuana, Taiwan, Warsaw, Paris, Isles of Scilly, Glasgow, Los Angeles, Canvey Island, Milan, Cape Town, Kuala Lumpur, Trinidad & Tobago, Santiago, Santander, Chicago, Carmarthen, Montreal, Oslo, Tomar, Hamburg, Prague, The Hague, Boston, Biarritz and many others.

I’ve subsequently had enquiries from many organisations wanting to use the software we devised for the site, including Greenpeace UK & New Zealand, Oxfam and Save The Children. Radiohead got in on the act and Thom Yorke posted a link to the site, and The Pixies gave us a Mexican wave video for the site.

The Wave banner ad
We also created this banner ad which we ran on some of the major newspapers and environmental websites. Clicking it took you to The Wave video site.

Due to the engaging nature of The Wave video site it spread virally extremely well and was receiving well over 6,000 unique visitors per day in the run up to the main event, and became the approx 13,000th most popular website in the UK according to Alexa stats. Because I wanted to make sure people were actually going to turn up on the day, I made sure as many people as possible watching the videos, would then come to the main Stop Climate Chaos website for more details about The Wave. I think this is reflected in the fact the main site was receiving over 11,000 unique visitors a day shortly before The Wave, mostly to the pages detailing information about the event.

I also made sure we were getting as much exposure on social media platforms as we possibly could, and with the help of the Stop Climate Chaos member organisations, our Twitter hashtag #TheWave that I created for the campaign, became the first charity hashtag in the world to “trend” on Twitter.