If you watched the Summer Games from the Seattle area last year, you may have spotted a few newly minted celebrities: the Weyerhaeuser employees featured in the 2021 Washington’s Working Forests ad campaign created by the Washington Forest Protection Association.
Founded in 1908, the WFPA is a trade association of private forest landowners working to advance sustainable forestry in Washington state. One of the group’s major goals is to educate the public about what foresters actually do and why working forests are so important.
“Many people don’t realize how hard foresters work to protect the millions of acres of forest and 60,000 miles of streams in our state,” says Meghan Tuttle, environmental affairs manager for Western Timberlands. “These commercials show off our core values, our expertise and our gorgeous forests.”
MODELS OF THE INDUSTRY
Meghan coordinated with WFPA’s media team and our local operations to select sites, find foresters to feature in the videos and make sure everything ran smoothly during filming.
The three TV commercials were filmed over two days at the end of May 2021. They starred Jammer Free, area manager for our 184,000-acre tree farm in Pe Ell; Amanda Sandhop, who was a land use and environmental manager at the time and recently moved to Texas to take on a role as home improvement warehouse sales service manager; and Jason Walter, aquatic resources manager. Meghan also made a cameo appearance as a tree planter.
“We don’t need actors, because we have our foresters,” jokes Kevin Godbout, director of environmental affairs, who currently chairs the WFPA public information committee. “All you have to do is put them in front of a camera.”
CAUGHT FISH-HANDED
Jammer is very familiar with our Pe Ell tree farm and helped the film crew scout locations the day before the shoot.
“They wanted to feature a variety of landscapes, like a classic picturesque Pacific Northwest forest with ferns and moss, a stream with mature trees at the edges and waterfalls,” Jammer says. “We even saw salmon in the water and eagles flying overhead.”
In the ads, Jammer measures trees with diameter tape, takes core samples with an increment borer and uses a clinometer, a tool to measure tree height.
“The film crew had never seen a forester take core samples before, and it was fun to see how fascinated they were with the process,” Meghan says. “Jammer was up there displaying exactly the kind of professionalism and authenticity they were looking for.”
Meanwhile, in his clip Jason brings salmon fry for others to see and tests water quality, while Amanda calculates tree distance and height with a laser range finder (which looks a bit like binoculars) for forest inventory and analysis.
“In addition to the commercials, the crew filmed b-roll footage of our Pe Ell tree farm that will now be front and center in WFPA’s public-facing advocacy for years to come,” Meghan says.
MOVING THE NEEDLE
The ads aired on cable networks during a six-week period in August and September. One is 15 seconds long, one is 30 seconds and the other is a full minute.
The ads specifically targeted voters with an interest in conservation living in the Puget Sound metro area of Washington, but they were also broadcast to a wider area in both Washington and Oregon.
“I got to see the commercials live on TV from my home outside Salem, Oregon,” Meghan says. “When I shared the YouTube clips on Facebook, a bunch of people living in rural Oregon reached out to say they saw them while watching a Mariners baseball game or the morning news.”
While the commercials made the biggest splash, the campaign also includes efforts like digital display banners on the Seattle Times newspaper’s website, robocalls to voters, information presented to state legislators, and the Working Foresters section of Washington’s Working Forests’ website.
“We have extensive public polling that goes back to the 1980s, and we always ask the question, ‘Do you believe that forest landowners work to improve water quality or fish habitat?’” Kevin says. “And 60 to 70 percent of respondents say yes. We’ve found that the group that responds ‘I don’t know’ are the ones who benefit most from our campaigns. Every year, we’re moving that needle further over to ‘yes’.”
To thank them for their starring roles, the video consultant also created these magazine "covers" for each of our employees involved in the project.
Weyerhaeuser was one of the founding members of WFPA, which began as an effort to protect Washington forests from wildfires. WFPA has been creating print and TV advertising campaigns to educate the public about the benefits of our habitat conservation plans for salmon recovery and clean water since the 1990s.
“It was eye-opening to see how much goes into the pre-production process and how many takes you have to do when you’re onsite,” Meghan (right) says. “They film hours and hours of footage for commercials that are under a minute long.”
“The WFPA crew was great to work with, and I got to learn more about them in the process,” Jammer (right) says. “It was great to see how much our core values are aligned.”
