The Hive was asked by a coalition of 200 California ocean–related organizations (including the state of California and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) to create a public awareness campaign for the ocean. The assignment: Give all Californians personal reasons to care about and protect the ocean. The challenge: Surveys showed that the ocean ranked near the bottom of the list of Californians’ environmental concerns. To make our marketing challenge even harder, our research showed that people have developed sophisticated defense mechanisms to filter out stressful “issues” in advertising messages. We had to find a way to appeal to people in a positive way that created a living, breathing personal connection with the ocean. The answer was unexpectedly simple, and it started with the name: thankyouocean.org. This campaign reminded people of all the ways the ocean touches everyone and everything, from new medical discoveries to clean air and business. To get the word out, we created a statewide integrated advertising campaign that drove interested parties to the website thankyouocean.org. With only enough budget to pay for limited production and virtually no media, we negotiated a significant donated outdoor media buy as well as free placement at 25 TV stations in all major California cities. Thankyouocean.org is still going strong after three years.