Recently, I had the opportunity to work on Los Angeles Sanitation and Environmentβs OrganicsLA / βGreen Bin It, LAβ campaign for LASAN that was supposed to teach city residents and restaurant owners about composting and using LASAN green bins for composting food scraps. I was part of both the creative and production teams when it comes to food behaviors, working closely with the agency and producer on the culinary concepts, cultural representation of food, and direction of the residential scenes.
A public campaign in the city of Los Angeles is an interesting and quite big creative and behavioral challenge because you are speaking to one of the most culturally diverse communities in the world. If the campaign intends to change human habits within a household, and especially when it comes to something as ordinary and personal as what people do with food scraps in their own kitchens, you also have to think about how to translate their everyday lives through the food, the kitchen, the people, and their behavior in the content.
The completed LASAN Organics Campaign became one of the most far-reaching municipal organics education efforts in the country.
Think about what you need to produce:
15 languages
72 original videos
213 individual digital ad campaigns
The production involved 15 different sets of cultures, demographics, and family scenarios representing the cultural and ethnic diversity of Los Angeles.
The project came with a more interesting creative problem than simply putting attractive food in front of a camera and shooting it. Each target demographic, the family and its members, needed an authentic and believable culinary kitchen scenario that belonged to them.
My background came in extremely handy in the case of this project. It combines food and beverage photography and video production, sociology, consumer behavior, food culture, culinary direction, food styling, and commercial production. On this project, all those disciplines were part of it.
We had to think about the socio-demographics and cultural background of the people being portrayed, their culinary traditions, what they might actually cook at home, what ingredients they would use, how they would use them, what their LA-based kitchen and home would look like while they were cooking, and what kinds of food scraps would naturally result.
A family wasnβt simply standing next to a bowl of vegetables selected because they looked good or the colors photographed well. Although that mattered too because they had to pop on camera, so it was a double creative challenge.
And please keep in mind that the hero in this whole LASAN Organics Campaign wasnβt the beautiful, untouched food or beautifully plated dishes. The hero was scraps. So I had to come up with ideas for which foods generate enough scraps to compost. How can it be used in culinary scenarios for all these cultures? What kind of props should we use with it to make sense? It was a lot of thinking, but that is something that I like. It makes me excited.
On top of that, the actors had to be doing something believable that made sense for a family meal. What dish are they making? Soup or stir-fry? Who is preparing it? Grandmother and granddaughter? What is being chopped or peeled and creating waste? What is already cooked? What is sitting on the prep table or countertop? What would this particular family actually eat? How would the actors naturally interact with the food and with one another to create a fun and authentic atmosphere?
We had to bring in leftovers that were rolling around in the fridge, the peels and scraps, all kinds of stuff, coffee grounds. There were just a lot of interesting little details we had to take care of for this campaign.
And importantly for the campaign: What organic waste would this cooking behavior naturally produce, and how could we incorporate putting those scraps into the green bin? We had to show it without making the scene look like an instructional demonstration, but like a natural action that happens in everyoneβs home, and it doesnβt matter whose home.
Those decisions started during creative development and continued on set.
I worked with the agency and producers to develop the culinary concepts before production, source and prepare the food and ingredients required to make those concepts believable, and then help direct the culinary action and set during the shoot.
That included working with the actors around their interaction with prepping ingredients and the physical movement required by the scenes of generating and discarding scraps. What useful action for the campaign can someone do when they chop, stir, cook, serve, clean, or handle food scraps on camera? Those actions become part of the storytelling. If they donβt feel natural, the entire scene starts looking staged and unrelatable. This was not your everyday advertising campaign.
I also had to match the props and their use to each scene and plan the culinary action around the appropriate food waste: bones, peels, seeds, leftovers, and other byproducts of preparing and eating food. The waste itself had to make sense in relation to what the family was cooking. We werenβt simply placing scraps into a green bin for the photograph. The scraps needed to be a believable consequence of the culinary activity happening in the scene.
And authenticity mattered particularly because these werenβt fifteen interchangeable families.
Los Angeles includes Latino, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, white and multicultural communities with enormously different culinary histories and everyday food habits. The campaign needed to communicate one common behavior while allowing those different households to remain recognizably themselves.
The same green bin. Different kitchens and kitchenware. Different ingredients. Different family types and relationships. Different tastes and preferences.
A Behavior-Change Campaign at the Scale of Los Angeles
The creative work was part of a much larger effort.
The campaign was designed as an education and behavior-change campaign around one deceptively simple action: getting Los Angeles residents to separate their food scraps from regular trash and put them into the green bin.
That small household behavior matters at enormous scale. Here are some mind-blowing stats:
Los Angelesβ organics program serves ~750,000 households and collects more than 400,000 tons of organic material annually for processing at composting facilities. More than 100,000 tons of finished compost each year are then delivered to more than 80 California farms and ranches, returning material that began as kitchen scraps back to the soil used to grow food.
The environmental reason is equally significant. Food and other organic material decomposing in landfills produces methane. Californiaβs Senate Bill 1383 established a statewide goal of reducing organic waste disposal by 75%, making participation by individual households and businesses an important part of a much greater environmental effort.
But legislation and infrastructure alone donβt change what somebody does while cleaning up dinner.
People have to change a habit.
That is where communication, culture and behavioral understanding become important. Rather than treating Los Angeles as one homogeneous audience, the campaign was designed to meet people within their own communities, routines and languages.
The campaign was grounded in extensive LA community research, including four residential focus groups in English and Spanish and 12 in-depth interviews with Los Angeles restaurant owners and managers. The findings were used to shape the messaging, visuals, creative assets, and outreach channels.
The LASAN Organics Campaign by the Numbers
This campaign became one of the most far-reaching municipal educational efforts in the country. It included:
SCOPE: 15 languages, 72 original videos, 213 individual digital ad campaigns
DISTRIBUTION: across many social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Nextdoor, and Google
RESULTS: The digital campaign was executed in three phases, moving people from understanding the problem toward incorporating the behavior into everyday life, and in total generated 68.7 million digital impressions and more than 21 million video views.
The campaign extended beyond digital advertising as well. More than 300 restaurants were visited in person for education and outreach, while neighborhood events and city programs brought the message directly into Los Angeles communities.
Translating More Than Words
What remains particularly interesting to me is something that marketing frequently gets wrong: Cultural representation isnβt accomplished by casting diverse people.
If you put a family on camera and everything surrounding them feels culturally generic, youβve represented their appearance without representing much about their life. Food gives you another language. What people cook, how they prepare it, how they gather around it, what ingredients they recognize and even what they throw away carry information about culture, family and everyday life.
The LASAN Organics Campaign was communicating an extremely simple action: Put your food scraps in the green bin. But that action needed to become meaningful across a city of approximately four million people with dramatically different cultural backgrounds, culinary traditions, and kitchen and household routines.
The campaign could translate its words into 15 languages. Our creative challenge was to translate the life inside the picture too.