WordPress.com has a little plan to 'save' the world from its big problems

An ambitious new campaign from WordPress.com aims not to make a big splash, but a small one--by shrinking the entire world’s population down to the size of bugs. Mad, you say? WordPress.com will show you! WordPress.com will show all of you!

Ahem.

This decidedly “not evil” plan is actually the brainchild of the scientist who stars in the web publishing platform’s quirky and very meta campaign. A 30-second TV spot begins with the traditional litany of dreams to be chased, but those are quickly followed by the piercing stare of a man who isn’t afraid to crack a few eggs in his quest to make the world’s problems smaller.

WordPress is leaning heavily into the fiction, with two print ads in The New Yorker on Monday pushing the scientist’s website, which lays out the extremely rational reasons the whole planet’s carbon footprint (and actual footprints) should be scaled down.

The ads from Interesting Development direct readers to www.shrinkify.com, a tongue-in-cheek vision of a bright little future. A bit of exploration leads both to WordPress signups and FAQs as well as a link to the real-life Miniature World theme park in Victoria, British Columbia (which boasts, completely without irony, of being one of the top three places to visit in town).

The TV spot is running on A&E, AMC, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, CNN, The History Channel, MSNBC and National Geographic and will be accompanied by an audio spot running on podcasts including The New York Times’ “The Daily” and NPR’s “How I Built This.”