ANUBIS

Written by Eliot Beer, Monday, 07 December 2009

The IAA’s “Hopenhagen” effort has managed to drum up more than $10 million-worth of pro-bono advertising from UAE media outlets, the association announced today.

Hopenhagen is a world-wide push by the IAA to raise awareness of climate change in the run up to the UN summit on climate change, starting today, in Copenhagen – hence the name.

(Hopenhagen is like Copenhagen, except with a ‘H’ instead of a ‘C’, turning it into “Hope-nhagen”, conveying the message of… eh, forget it. If you don’t understand by now, there’s no hope for you anyway.)

“There has been a real momentum to the local campaign, because we have been able to engage with our key media partners who understood this is a critical issue of our time. Their support has helped generate mass awareness and mass exposure,” said Hermann Behrens, chairman of the IAA UAE chapter’s communications committee (and otherwise head of The Brand Union in the Middle East), in a press release.

“The IAA is extremely grateful to all our media partners for their proactive support and I believe as an industry we can be proud of our efforts in driving positive action through communication, in support of a concrete and I hope ultimately successful plan for sustained, climate management,” he added.

The IAA elsewhere in the region has also been active, with the Kuwait chapter, under the leadership of anti-scam fanatic Louai Alasfahani, bringing significant players in the Kuwaiti media industry on board, including Kuwait Times, Arab Times, Al Rai, Kuwait National Cinema Company, and many others.

The effort is all aimed at getting people to log on to hopenhagen.org and sign a petition on the site calling for world leaders to generally pull their fingers out on the whole pesky global warming issue.

The Copenhagen summit itself is set to run into some controversy, however, following the theft and subsequent release of hundreds of emails and sections of computer source code from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, a leading climate research centre in the UK.

Much of the material is somewhat inflammatory, and appears to suggest that scientists at the Unit may have been overly selective with data, and in fact may not have some vital data sets at all. However, a vigorous debate about the context of many of these emails has developed, with many suggesting that critics are taking them out of very specific contexts, along with calls for a more thorough investigation. It looks like this one will run for a while.

(For those interested, there’s lots more on “Climategate” here.)

Anyway, that’s by the by – the IAA here has managed to do its part with generating all that coverage in magazines and such. In the immortal words of Bruce Forsyth, didn’t they do well?

Source: IAA squeezes $10m from UAE media for Hopenhagen

Related link: IAA works for hope at Copenhagen