Drive Clean Bay Area Campaign: The Biggest Thing You Can Do
The Challenge
In the Bay Area, people already believe they’re doing their part for the environment. They recycle. They compost. They bring reusable bags to the way-overpriced grocery stores.
But when it comes to the single biggest source of personal emissions, driving, most people weren’t making the switch. Drive Clean Bay Area needed to change that.
The Strategy
Instead of celebrating all the small things people already do, the campaign confronted a harder truth:
You can do all the little things. But the biggest thing is going electric. By placing EV adoption above everyday eco habits, the campaign gave people a clearer sense of where real impact comes from.
YOU DO THE SMALL. NOW DO THE BIG.
Creative Platform
“You do the small. Now do the big.”
The platform leaned into contrast. Small actions versus big ones. Good intentions versus real impact. The tone was smart, slightly irreverent, and very Bay Area. It didn’t dismiss sustainable habits. (Well, maybe a smidge.) It put them in perspective.
Execution
Social and Digital Campaign
The campaign lived primarily in digital and social environments, meeting Bay Area residents where they already engage. Short-form videos and static executions highlighted the gap between everyday eco behaviors and the larger impact of switching to electric vehicles.
Behavioral Reframing
The work playfully challenged familiar habits, using humor and recognition to make the message land. Instead of telling people what to do, it showed them the difference between what feels impactful and what actually is.
Conversion Path
The campaign connected awareness directly to action through a group purchase and leasing program, making it easier and more affordable for consumers to switch to EVs.
Results
The campaign directly sold 1.5 EVs every single day it ran, for a cost of around $86 per car. Those are insane sales numbers any car salesperson would be damn proud of.
Why It Worked
Most environmental campaigns encourage people to do more. This one showed people what matters more. By reframing the conversation around impact instead of effort, the campaign cut through fatigue and made the message stick.
About Division of Labor
Division of Labor is a San Francisco advertising agency specializing in campaigns that shift behavior at scale. We help organizations take complex issues and turn them into clear, actionable ideas that people can understand and act on. Drive Clean Bay Area partnered with Division of Labor to turn climate awareness into meaningful change.
Campaign Overview
Drive Clean Bay Area partnered with Division of Labor to launch a campaign encouraging electric vehicle adoption across the region. By reframing EVs as the most impactful personal action individuals can take for the environment, the campaign increased awareness, shifted perception, and connected consumers to programs that made switching to electric more accessible.
WANNA KNOW MORE?
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The San Francisco Bay Area is pretty environmentally conscious. Nowhere else in the country do more people recycle, compost, bring their bags to the store, conserve water, buy organic, wear natural fibers, eat with dietary restrictions, use clean energy, reuse coffee cups, outlaw straws! Yes, people in the Bay Area do a lot. But do they really?
Division of Labor has been an ad agency in San Francisco for well over a decade. We’ve seen the behaviors of consumers as they relate to a variety of products; packaged goods, technology, software, entertainment products and more. And while people in San Francisco regularly espouse views in favor of environmental action, their actions may not be as consequential as they think.
Division of Labor works with a lot of startups, something you might expect from an ad agency in San Francisco, but much of the work we do deals with behavior change. Things like, switching from regular TV to streaming, moving from servers to cloud storage, going from passwords to a passwordless internet; all these behavior changes are things we confronted in campaigns for different startup clients that had a pretty big impact on how people live their lives.
So what was the behavior change in this case?
The biggest thing a person can do for the environment is switch to an electric car. Recycling is great, organic is wonderful, and composting is lovely, but driving a gas-powered car does more to affect climate change than anything. But it’s a huge behavior shift. It’s more expensive, it’s disruptive, there’s range anxiety, it’s new! We had to convince people who are already pretty environmentally conscious, to make this rather big change.
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Give them credit for all the small things they do and then encourage them to step it up. As an advertising agency in San Francisco, we’ve seen a lot of the guilt and blame game. Make people feel bad, show the destruction, pull on their heartstrings, enough! People work hard around here trying to do what’s right. We need to give them the credit they deserve, and then push them to do more.
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This campaign for Drive Clean Bay Area ran only in social media. It had a very small spend behind it. But the campaign directly sold 1.5 electric cars every single day it ran, for a cost of around $86 per car. Think about that; we sold a car and a half a day and spent around $86 for each car we sold. Any car salesperson would give a customer $86 from their own pocket to get a sale.
Besides the campaign getting people interested, we pushed people to a microsite that allowed them to buy an EV at a discount as part of a group purchase. So they saved a few bucks AND did their environmental good deed.