Unlocking the power of Gen Z to inspire 2bn ways to make the world a little better
Last month (February 2018) we launched the Digital Society Index to get a clearer understanding of what challenges we’re facing in the digital economy. As our CEO Jerry Buhlmann wrote in the World Economic Forum post Three Ways to Improve Trust in the Digital Economy: “The challenge for business leaders and policymakers is to get better at doing and talking. ‘Doing’ in the sense of practical strategies and steps that help people succeed in the digital economy. And ‘talking’ in the sense that businesses and governments alike need to get better at communicating the value of the digital economy.”
Showcasing a way to get better at “doing and talking”, we partnered with Google to launch the Little x Little platform on 16 March 2018. Little x Little is a global campaign in support of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It’s a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the advertising industry and Google in support of the SDGs, and will leverage the power of YouTube and global influencers to mobilize Gen Z to inspire out 2 billion acts of good.
Little x Little is rooted in the truth that exponential change can be made possible through the repetition of little acts by the largest generation on earth. To kick-start the platform, model and activist Jillian Mercado is featured in the anthem video which has already garnered more than 19 million views in just two weeks. She will be joined by a raft of further influences, predominatly Gen Y themselves and active digitally, to activate the campaign in the US, UK, India and Nigeria. As a result, the Little x Little platform itself has already surpassed 9K subscribers on YouTube.
This global campaign is under the banner of Common Ground. In April 2017, the six founding members of Common Ground, Dentsu, Havas, IPG, Omnicom, Publicis and WPP alongside Wieden + Kennedy — with the financial, creative and logistical support of Google — came together under the banner ‘The Common Futures Project’. The initial direction was conceived in a ‘hackathon’ in New York drawing on resources from all agency partners and then developed further by a coalition of agencies including Sapient Razorfish, Ogilvy and Mediacom.
What is most important about this project — and the Little x Little platform it has delivered — is that this is not a one-off campaign; rather it’s a platform that will inspire the next generation, Gen Z, to take little but meaningful actions to contribute towards the SDGs. This is the industry talking the talk and walking the walk to build trust, be transparent and show what power everyone has in the digital economy to tackle the world’s biggest challenges.
