The Breaking The Brand is delighted to let all our supporters know that our demand reduction campaign went live in Viet Nam 15th September 2014.

Over the next 10 weeks, we are running 19 full and half page adverts in 5 magazines including 2 consecutive months in Heritage, The Vietnam Airlines magazine. Our first advert (shown below) is from a magazine called ‘Investment Bridge’. It is a weekly magazine targeted at businessmen and has a circulation of 65,000.

To our supporters around the world, thank you for helping the BTB team in Melbourne make this happen.

It has been an 18 months since launching the idea in February 2013. For a group of volunteers, none of whom had a conservation background, it was a steep learning curve:

  • Interviewing and finding support in the Vietnamese community in Melbourne
  • Being networked into and interviewing the users of genuine rhino horn in Viet Nam about their motivations to use rhino horn and who and what could influence them to stop
  • Traveling to a number of countries in Africa to see the impacts of the poaching problem first hand. Including meeting owners and managers of conservancies and anti-poaching team members who put their lives on the line night-after-night
  • Introducing our ideas and models to the conservation community worldwide
  • Building Breaking The Brand’s profile and raising funds

As a volunteer group we have covered our own expenses so 100% of the funds donated have gone to creating and publishing the campaign.

But this is just the beginning. Breaking The Brand wishes that it could say that these types of campaigns would get an instant change in user purchasing behaviour. We will gauge the response to these initial adverts and undoubtedly they will need to evolve and become smarter over 2015.

Our aim is to use the impact of these adverts to raise Breaking The Brand’s profile and in turn raise funds to run the next campaign which has been designed to run in the month leading up to the Lunar New Year, 19th February 2015.

The New Year celebration which will welcoming in the year of the sheep is bad news for rhinos. Lunar New Year sees a spike in rhino horn as it is used as part of the ‘millionaires detox drink’. We look forward to introducing this campaign, titled ‘Will Your Luck Run Out During The Year of the Sheep?’.

To our supporters around the world who helped us raise the $30,000 to launch the adverts, thank you from the BTB team. Similarly, to everyone who has supported the campaign by donating images, their time, skills and energy a very big thank you. To stay informed check out our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/niabtb