The environmental group turned to advertising agency Leo Burnett to create ‘The Adventures of Harry Ficus’ as part of its ‘Love Your Forests’ campaign, which comes in this, the UN International Year of Forests.

The campaign, which will include a TV commercial and printed advertising as well as a children’s book, urges consumers to “Look for products with the label FSC”.

Andrea Wiseman, sustainable forests manager at WWF Australia, told ProPrint the aim was to raise awareness of the eco-label.

She said the LOHAS sustainability report showed that brand awareness of FSC in Australia was just 9%.

“The reason we are running the Love Your Forests campaign is not to promote the panda [WWF logo] but to promote FSC.”

She said it was important not just to recognise the FSC logo “but to understand what it stands for”.

Wiseman would not be drawn into discussion of last year’s ‘save as WWF’ debacle, but said “it is not WWF’s philosophy to tell people what to do”.

“We give people options. If people want to use save as WWF, they can, but if they don’t, we are saying use recycled or use FSC.”

The eco organisation caught the ire of printers around the world last year after its German division started plugging a new file format, ‘.wwf’, which could not be printed “to save trees”.

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