How media and content deliver progress on the Global Goals
A lot has changed in the two years since United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stood on the stage in Cannes and announced the Common Ground initiative. An unstable geopolitical context, an increasingly digital economy, societal inequality and disruption across our industry. But our global society’s challenges remain the same. Cue the Global Goals who are bringing business and society together to tackle them head-on. This is a real opportunity for media and content to step up and act, and so far we are already witnessing the good progress towards creating a better world by 2030.
As part of our commitment SDG3 Good health- and wellbeing, we delivered 23 campaigns across 17 countries in 2017, adding to the 22 campaigns in 2016. On top of that, we ran our first campaign to raise awareness of the Global Goals and started our work on our global partnership with Malaria No More. The hundreds of volunteers behind this work are part of the 11,714 colleagues gave their time to help 223 charities in 2017. Together they donated 69,159 working hours as part of our Society strategy. We shared our creative capability, PR and consulting expertise, our production and project management skills and of course leveraged more than £8m in media space. You can read more about this in our 2017 Common Ground Report.
Marshal the power of media for malaria
As an industry, we can marshal the power of media to get an issue on the agenda through public support. The #malariamustdie campaign is a good example. Built by a broad alliance of agencies inside and outside Dentsu Aegis Network, the campaign reached 22m people in 5 countries to exert pressure on political leaders. This strategy came through when world leaders pledged to halve malaria by 2023 with an additional capital infusion of USD$2.9bn into the Global Fund. Kate Wills, Director of Communications and Partnerships at Malaria No More said: “[This campaign] shows how crucial it is to have the cross-sector engagement and commitments […]. [Dentsu Aegis Network] showed that this is not just another siloed charity campaign but one that looks to engage the wider public and [business].”
Use content to change the behaviour of smokers
As agencies get more and more involved in producing content, the work we do becomes more powerful to affect change. A good example is the Moi(s) Sans Tabac campaign in France. By creating a support community for smokers that wish to stop, this campaign facilitated 887,000 trials. After a media campaign to create awareness for “Me, One Month, No Tobacco”, our agencies collaborated to create content through a partnership with France Televisions and its programme “Plus Belle Le Vie”. Anais Delugre, Manager, Carat France said: “We designed with the French government a multi-channel approach to change behaviour and creative a collective challenge that led to 3 times more stop attempts over the month”.
