Tree Correspondents

Hyundai Motor Company and FCB New York’s latest campaign, ‘Tree Correspondents,’ uses artificial intelligence (AI), data, and storytelling to give trees a voice, letting us experience the impact of climate change through their lived perspectives. The campaign is designed to raise awareness and invite deeper reflection on forest conservation and climate action, through an intimate lens.

Trees are more than silent observers of their environment—they interact with it constantly, responding to shifts in climate, weather, and ecosystem balance. Tree Correspondents brings these interactions into focus.

How It Works
The campaign uses a custom-built AI model developed by FCB New York and Uncharted Limbo Collective to analyze environmental data and uncover patterns in how trees in the IONIQ Forest—Hyundai’s global tree planting project mitigating climate change and conserving biodiversity—interact with their surroundings.

These insights form the basis of first-person stories from the perspectives of three trees—one each in Czechia, Brazil, and South Korea. The emotionally resonant narratives were informed by ecological signals gathered from the trees’ environments, along with scientific papers and historical data, and co-written by a team of writers and editors at FCB New York. Each dispatch focuses on the impact of climate change, restoring ecosystems, and preserving biodiversity.

The system combines real-time sensor data from METER Group, weather intelligence from The Weather Company, and a custom-built AI workflow using Large Language Model (LLM) technologies developed by Uncharted Limbo Collective. The system identified patterns and perspectives that informed each tree’s narrative voice using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Chain-of-Thought prompting, combined with time-series analysis algorithms that ingested decades of climate data and compared them with live sensor readings.

Global Distribution & Media Plan
The campaign lives across multiple platforms, including print ads in The Economist and National Geographic. In addition, Op-Ed articles “written” by trees, which are curated in partnership with a team of expert data scientists, tree experts, and internationally recognized journalists—will be published in:

Czech Republic: MF DNES, Právo, Hospodářské noviny
South Korea: Seoul Shinmun, The Asia Business Daily, Monthly design
Brazil: Valor Econômico, Folha de S.Paulo, Estadão, O Globo

Recognition and Milestones
Prior to today, the Tree Correspondents project has been active since March 21, 2025, the International Day of Forests. It has gained global recognition with three recent wins at the 2025 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, including two Gold Lions and one Silver Lion in the Digital Craft category.

The campaign coincides with two major milestones for Hyundai’s IONIQ Forest: the 10th anniversary of its launch and 1 million trees planted globally.

Launched in 2016 to celebrate the debut of the Hyundai IONIQ Electric, IONIQ Forest is a project that involves planting trees to create a better world for future generations. The project began to expand globally in 2021 with the launch of IONIQ 5, and earlier this month reached a total of 1 million trees planted in 13 countries around the world. Under the theme ‘Starting with the First Million,’ the Tree Correspondents campaign reaffirms the company’s commitment to continue its ecological efforts beyond the 1 million trees planted milestone.