Challenge
Every year, the Copernicus Ocean State Report is published by Mercator Ocean International (MOi)—the implementing body of the Copernicus Marine Service. To ensure the complex science in the report is accessible to key decision makers and interested parties, they also develop a series of annual public-facing promotional content. For the third year in a row, MOi teamed up with Design & Data to create a full text campaign, consisting of a 16-page executive summary, a short promotional video, a short social media campaign, a PowerPoint presentation, and two web articles. The considerable challenge of this project was condensing a 228-page scientific report into short, engaging, and pithy text about the key points and presenting it in a way that it could be understood by a broad and varied audience, from scientists to policymakers to the general public.
Idea, solution
Creating text for multiple forms of media required an innate understanding of the data and content in the report. Liaising with science and communication experts from MOi, the D&D creative team performed in-depth research and identified the most important key takeaways. These key takeaways were then divided into three focuses: the Blue (physical state), Green (biological state), and White (sea ice) Ocean. Following this three-section structure for each deliverable helped organise the key takeaways and present the text in a way that was understandable by non-scientists while maintaining scientific accuracy. The text in each deliverable was also set to an infographic communication style, where explainer 2D animations, graphs, and charts were included to better explain the complex scientific concepts while keeping in mind the different audience criteria.
Result
Using the three-pronged organization style, the D&D team successfully created informative and easy-to-understand text content for a full 16-page infographic style summary, an 8-day Twitter campaign, a 2 minute and 41 second highlight video, a 10-slide PowerPoint presentation, and two web articles, one for the MOi website and one for the Copernicus Observer newsletter. Certain pieces were more promotional in nature (i.e., the social media and web articles), and others more scientific (i.e., the summary). However, all the items successfully communicated advanced ocean science in a succinct and understandable way. Since MOi is based in France, the D&D team also translated the summary, social media posts, and one web article into French. The full summary, highlight video, PowerPoint, and article can be found on the MOi website. The social media posts can be found on Twitter @CMEMS_EU.
By loading the video, you agree to YouTube’s privacy policy.
Learn more
All material is protected, owned, and controlled by Design & Data as the provider of the content or material.
Modification, publication, transmission, or reproduction of the content or material, whole or in part, is strictly prohibited without prior written authorization.