If the greater good’s at stake, advertising needs to move beyond campaign-based thinking
I spent the early years of my career at some of the world’s most respected organisations in commercial creativity and advertising. I was initially drawn to that world because of the mix of the intellectual challenge of the strategic aspects and the fast-paced environment. I was soon more and more interested in corporations using their brands for good.
During my time at D&AD I spent many hours pouring over the coveted D&AD Annual and the Pencil winners. I spent multiple days at a time locked in a dark room going through hundreds of entries for the Awards with the most respected creatives in the business. I led them through the judging process through which they determined which campaigns demonstrated creative excellence—great ideas, brilliantly executed.
Whilst at D&AD, my brilliant colleague and manager at the time was hard at work launching the inaugural White Pencil in 2013. Its goal? To “[celebrate] the power of creativity to stimulate positive change”. It felt like a step change, a paradigm shift into more systemic approaches and sustainable thinking when it comes to using creativity for more than driving sales. That year, I was off to the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival. Along with the D&AD Awards, it’s one on the pinnacles in the advertising calendar: a rosé-fuelled networking occasion for advertising types going from yachts to pool parties and, occasionally, the conference. I was there to promote the White Pencil and, whilst having a great time going to parties that were way beyond my average life, couldn’t quite work out how the social change and debaucherous beach parties fit together.
Knowing who’s who in the world of advertising, and how a great campaign differs from a terrible one, landed me a job at Contagious, a prestigious marketing strategy consultancy and award-winning magazine. It’s well known in the world of advertising as a high-quality B2B resource of benchmark campaigns and brand initiatives. During my time at Contagious alone, I roughly looked at about 400 campaigns and advertising-related news stories per week. At four weeks holiday per year that’s a very conservative estimate of 38,400 news stories I looked at in the time I spent there. I roamed the digital globe for the best initiatives between Chile and South Korea.
During my stint at Contagious in particular, I learnt some of the basic principles of journalism: checking sources, crediting accurately, working out what can be said in public with utmost integrity. We spent hours digging into the results for campaigns—was it just a stunt to drive Facebook Likes without shifting sales for the business? Did the VIP Fridge Magnet button really increase sales over 500% within four weeks? Why did the phone number listed on the pizzeria’s website go straight to the marketing department of an advertising agency?
Having spent a little bit of time in an advertising agency, I learnt that creatives and strategists alike enjoy working on charity clients. Whilst they may not pay the big bucks like the Unilever, Mondelēz or Coca-Cola, they do allow the agencies to push the creative boat out. And not ‘push the boat out’ as in the award-winning app that exaggerated its ability to locate boats full of refugees that might need rescuing, which turned out to be a fake. The award got returned, by the way.
Advertising is full of brilliant people: smart, driven, creative, hard-working. They come up with concepts like drinking-water-generating billboards, like this one in Lima, Peru—one of the biggest cities in the world, located in one of the driest areas on the planet.
Do I believe that the billboard served its purpose at the time, to drive enrolments for theUniversity of Engineering and Technology of Peru (UTEC)? Probably. Do I believe that it fulfilled its potential? No way. Imagine billboards that helped high-humidity cities generate clean drinking water in places around the world.
Back in 2011, outdoor clothing label Patagonia encouraged people ahead of consumer-frenzy Black Friday not to buy new items. The same year, the company launched Common Threads, an initiative pairing with eBay encouraging consumers to buy and trade second-hand items. Unilever’s Help A Child Reach Five initiative encouraged basic hygiene routines hand washing to decrease the likelihood of children in developing countries dying from poor sanitation. They may well be selling more Lifebouy (a Unilever brand) soap in the process, but that seems like a positive by-product of saving some lives.
Advertising campaign-based thinking may help the lucky few shareholders get richer, but it doesn’t do enough in the face of geopolitical and other challenges created by humans. In the age of Trump, Brexit, a refugee crisis, the rise of the far right in too many nations, and climate-change disaster to name but a few, advertising is going to have to step up its game to contribute to a wider paradigm shift. Campaign-based thinking works—for organisations to which a campaign is a path to engagement en route to a bigger purpose. Like ActionStation’s mission of engaging citizens in campaigns with the view to involve them in more decisions affecting New Zealand’s democracy.
Since departing the London shores of advertising I have spent my time as a member of the Enspiral network. A distributed group of people committed to working on areas as broad as transparent decision making, democracy, education, youth wellbeing and more. We’re prototyped new ways of organising, of working together, of creating emotionally and financially sustainable livelihoods. It’s by no means perfect, but has been making ripples in the worlds of many of the buzzwords of new ways of working.
With high hopes, I entered Enspiral into the D&AD’s White Pencil Awards this year with the below video.
As per D&AD’s information, the Community section is for ‘Ideas that have started a new community or nurtured an existing one. The community could be built around a common interest, shared asset or geographical area. Community members, whether individual or groups, should directly benefit from being part of the community.
This could be work that helps existing communities build on their assets, abilities and interests, fostering community and engagement amongst groups such as company employees or projects that empower communities with information, education and new skills.’
I’d hoped that by entering, prototypes like the Enspiral network might get pushed further into the mainstream. Where distributed ways of working, collective decision making, transparent and collaborative budgeting might pique the interest of those with influence in other spheres. Safe to say that Enspiral didn’t get shortlisted.
The winning piece of work? A marketing stunt in which outdoor clothing retailer REI closed its doors on Black Friday and instead encouraged people to spend the day outside. According to the awards video, other retailers followed suit. That’s nice, but is it enough?
Maybe great campaign ideas, with brilliant execution which don’t address the root-cause of some our biggest global issues, just won’t do anymore?
As someone who’s stood in both worlds, the commercial and the social, I strongly believe that we need each other to make this world a better place. Brands can move incredibly fast, when they want to, and have huge influence in our modern world, but can lack the long-term positive intention. The community world has the heart in the right place but at certain times can struggle with super tight and convincing communication—and thus could take a slice from the advertising world when it comes to selling its wares.
As my friend and co-conspirator Ants Cabraal said, maybe instead of social enterprise and enterprise, the social element must become so embedded into everything we do that the only way classification for businesses is enterprise,—and anti-social enterprise.
Advertising can be the infrastructure to create a better world.
Earlier this year I was struck by a campaign covered by The Guardian. It speaks of a “desperate-looking boy scrounging for food in a public rubbish bin and appearing to snack on discarded food scavenged from inside”.
A real-life social experiment filmed in central Auckland on behalf of NZ Police. I was surprised to spot this in an international newspaper—and in fact searching on Google turns up more international results than New Zealand-based ones. The agency behind it, Ogilvy & Mather New Zealand, certainly did a good job distributing this internationally.
Now maybe I try my best to avoid mainstream commercial media outlets and missed this front-page occurrence? But surely my Facebook or Twitter social-change aficionados would have shared it heavily on social media? Maybe my Enspiral friends on our Slack channel or Loomio groups? Nada. Not a Share, View or Like in sight.
My point? Campaigns appear and disappear usually within a number of days, usually, and often only make waves within the advertising system. No average human hears of a campaign that is all the rage in the advertising system.
Advertising’s investment into communication has the ability to change attitudes and behaviours, but often it’s not directed at the right issues.
Now, I know what my work is in New Zealand. Abysmal stats for domestic violence (one in four women), youth suicide (highest in the OECD) and incarceration rates of indigenous peoples (50% of prison population, at 14% of the population) keep me on track with my work. Wherever you may be in the world, I trust you know the wicked issues in your part of the world. If you’re stuck for places where to start: 1 in 5 children in the USA live below the federal poverty threshold, people in the UK being hospitalised for malnutrition is up. The far-right nationalists are on the rise on many European countries.
Brands and corporations are one of the few things left that operate at a scale that affects the lives of everyone, from job creation to environmental impact
[CampaignLive — Post-election: 5 ways brands can be a force for good http://www.campaignlive.com/article/post-election-5-ways-brands-force-good/1417304]
Wherever you are, there’s work to be done. For the developers who are still ashamed of the code they’ve written, for the advertising folks who need to get their clients involved in real-world change, for community-minded folks to acknowledge the power of business. Unless we start working together on the issues that really matter, none of the challenges of the modern age will get any smaller.
If you’ve got the opportunity, the power or the influence then now is the time.
