Nakate's debut featured in 'standout' marketing campaign

Author and climate activist Vanessa Nakate has been featured in a “standout” campaign ahead of publication of her debut A Bigger Picture (One Boat). 

Nakate travelled from Uganda to the UK to launch the book with a campaign that included various events and a marketing spread of billboards across Glasgow for COP26. 

“With a short lead-time, One Boat’s publicity and marketing team worked hard to create powerful partnerships that would involve impactful events and social activity,” the Pan Macmillan sustainability imprint said of the “standout” campaign. A Bigger Picture was acquired in a nine-way auction earlier this year, tipped by the publisher as a “part rousing manifesto, part poignant memoir”. It was published on 28th October.

Nakate was embroiled in a famous incident at Davos in January 2020 when her image was cropped out of a photo featuring four other activists, all white, including friend Greta Thunberg. Nakate went public and the ensuing outrage brought her work to wider attention, reflecting the white and Western interests in the climate change movement. In A Bigger Picture, she explores the incident and demonstrates how it is indicative of a far larger problem.

The first partnership to flag the publication was with the Eden Project which featured an in-person event at the venue consisting of Nakate in conversation with Eden co-founder Sir Tim Smit, a filmed event that will go out to thousands of people as part of the Eden Project Festival of Discovery.  

A second partnership was formed with The Conduit Club in London, which hosted a panel event with Nakate that reached over 200 people both in person and online, followed by 20 climate activists.

There was also a global virtual launch event in partnership with FANE.  

A billboard campaign across Glasgow accompanied Nakate's trip to the city for COP26, close to the conference centre in Scotland Street. One Boat said: “The marketing team envisioned bringing the book to life with out-of-home activity and since Vanessa and a large section of her audience would be in Glasgow for COP26, the city was chosen as the location for billboard advertising. The special build took the form of multiple billboard posters made up of recycled newspaper, emblazoned with a key quote from the book, ‘We are on the frontline, but we are not on the front pages’."

Nakate also appeared the cover of TIME Magazine, in a joint serialisation deal with US publisher Mariner Books, and featured in numerous other publications. 

The activist grew up in Kampala and started her activism in December 2018 after becoming concerned about the unusually high temperatures in her country. Inspired by Thunberg to start her own climate movement in Uganda, Nakate began a solitary strike against inaction on the climate crisis in January 2019 and founded the Youth for Future Africa and the Africa-based Rise Up Movement. A Bigger Picture is her first book.