Announcing the cohort of trailblazers set to help reimagine advertising for a thriving future.
Purpose Disruptors and the Royal Society of the Arts (RSA) have convened representatives from parts of the advertising ecosystem — including brand NatWest, advertising agency AMV BBDO, media agency OMD, media owner Channel 4, awards body D&AD and insight agency Kantar — to embark on a 6-month journey to reimagine the future of the industry, supported by research partner Kings College London.
Written by Lisa Merrick-Lawless Purpose Disruptors Co-founder, Ceri Jones Project Director, Aimee Brewerton Comms and Community Manager and Ally Kingston Creative Lead.
Why do we need a new vision for the advertising industry?
Advertising currently promotes a ‘good life’ that centres on wealth, status and having more. It drives people to consume. But the more we consume, the more of our planet’s finite, precious resources, which we depend on — soil, water, air, materials — are depleted, and the more our environment degrades whilst we extract as much as we can to keep up with demand. In short we’re overshooting the earth’s life support systems (especially those of us in the Global North) — we need to rethink what a ‘good life’ is, and we need a new vision for the future of the advertising industry, one which moves away from driving unsustainable consumption and toward supporting a thriving future for all.
But getting to a new vision of the future is a foggy, complex, sticky space. Through our work at Purpose Disruptors, we know there is momentum and desire to make change happen. Our Good Life 2030 project has taken over 200 industry leaders through immersive online workshops to reimagine the future. It was here that we unearthed green shoots from all corners of the industry about what a new vision for the advertising industry could be:
“Move from being an industry in service of consumption, to an industry in service of life” — Toby Allen, Executive Creative Director, The&Partnership
But, the common sticking points prevail. As soon as big visions land, questions on how to make this a reality in practice — amidst the real economic, societal and political context we live in — boomerang back to us. Answering the central question “How do we transform the advertising industry to support a thriving future, in practice?” — has become urgent.
So, we’re embarking on a new project, to get to the heart of that inquiry, which we hope will unlock a new ambitious phase of industry transformation.
Introducing Reimagining Advertising: Towards a Thriving Future
We’re launching a new multi-year programme, Reimagining Advertising: Towards a Thriving Future, to enable us to plant seeds of experimentation across the advertising ecosystem, together with industry trailblazers and experts. The programme has been co-created with the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) — world-leading thinkers in systems change and regenerative leadership, and is being supported by our research partner King’s College London.
12 pioneering individuals committed to climate action, from 6 organisations will form a Learning and Action Group. Together we’ll explore, debate and stress-test emergent ideas over 6-months. We will reimagine the industry’s future together and discover new approaches and practices to help us get there.
Meet the Learning and Action Group
The group represents the core components of the wider advertising industry, including client NatWest, advertising agency AMV DDBO, media agency OMG, media owner Channel 4, awards body D&AD and insight agency Kantar — we hope these conditions will create fertile ground for ideas and implementation.
Find out more about our Learning and Action group members
The twelve members include:
Sophie Lloyd, Branded Entertainment and Creative Leader, Channel 4
Rupinder Downie, Sponsorship & Commercial Partner Leader, Channel 4
Matt Hardisity, Strategy Partner and Head of Strategy Innovation, AMV BBDO
Jonny White, Senior Business Director, AMV BBDO
Kimberley Johnson, Climate Campaign Lead, Natwest Group
Rachel Ward, Brand Marketing Manager, Natwest Group
Grant Beckley, Strategy Director, OMD
Hannah Stockton, Head of Strategy, OMD
Dara Lynch, CEO, D&AD
Charlotte Westlake, Head of Sustainability, D&AD
Jonathan Hall, Managing Partner, Sustainable Transformation Practice, Kantar
Emily Simons, Associate Director, Sustainable Transformation Practice, Kantar
We’re excited to work with this group through collaboration and exploring new ideas together.
The content we’ll be covering
There is a phenomenal body of work that underpins our Good Life 2030 work and this programme. We’re collaborating with a faculty of researchers and thought leaders from a range of backgrounds — drawing from their work in imagination, futures thinking, systems change, low-carbon living, post-growth economics and sustainable business to inform and inspire the content.
We’ll be diving into more key influences and resources on this blog over the coming months, but for the curious, three excellent starters are:
Donella Meadows, Places to Intervene in a System
Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics
These influential, pioneering contributions to the Systems Thinking discourse have been fundamental to this project.
What next?
We’ll be updating you with progress on our explorations along the way. Insight from this project will culminate in a white paper, to share what we see as the current state of the ecosystem, and what learning shifts are needed to move us towards transforming the advertising industry towards a thriving future.
We hope this project and the paper will form the provocation and inspiration to catalyse action industry-wide, and build towards the urgent change we need to see.
In parallel to this project, we invite people in the advertising, marketing and communications industry to use our Good Life 2030 Toolkit. It’s an online, open-source tool to imagine better. All practitioners, at any level, can use it to imagine a new future for our industry and society. We want as many people across all corners of the industry to explore, and participate in this pioneering, transformative space and contribute to a collective manifesto crystallising the future vision of the advertising industry.
Keep up to date with our progress by signing up to our Newsletter or following us on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.
About Purpose Disruptors
Purpose Disruptors are advertising reformers, catalysing the advertising industry’s climate transition towards halving emissions by 2030. Our vision is of an advertising industry transformed in service to a thriving future. In support of this vision, we work across five pillars: leadership, community, education, measurement and creativity. We believe that change begins at a personal level, our projects are designed to help people connect to the climate crisis on a deep personal level to create systemic change.
Our work is being recognised within the advertising industry and beyond. Recent achievements include our sell out Advertising Earth Day Summit at the Tate Modern attended by over 200 industry leaders and Advertised Emissions work adopted by the UN as best leadership practice featured at COP27. Previously we launched the first ever documentary about advertising, consumption and climate change, our ‘Good Life 2030 documentary’, at COP26. We also won a Purpose Award for our community creative campaign ‘The Great Reset’ in 2021, and all 3 Co-founders were recognised by Forbes as 43 people changing advertising for the climate and as Campaign Magazine’s Trailblazers Top 10 in 2020.
About Good Life 2030 (A Purpose Disruptors Project)
When it comes to climate change, there are many initiatives in the industry-defining what we must move away from and offering tools to make the existing system better. What is lacking is a positive, inspiring vision of what the industry could become. Informed by the growing field of emerging futures practices, this project is unique in its focus on long-term, Third Horizon systems change. As a complement to incremental (Second Horizon) initiatives and activities, Good Life 2030 creates the conditions for industry leaders to imagine radical transformation in a further future and take action towards this today.
We believe that new compelling visions of the future are needed, informed by everyday people, in order to facilitate the necessary culture, behaviour and system change required to halve carbon emissions by 2030. Good Life 2030 aims to support the industry in reappraising its role, developing a new understanding of what a Good Life means, and reconfiguring itself in service to this new Good Life.
About Royal Society of Arts (RSA)
We are the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). The RSA’s vision is a world where everyone can fulfil their potential and contribute to more resilient, rebalanced, and regenerative futures. Our mission — Design for Life — enables people, places, and the planet to flourish in harmony. We do this by uniting people and ideas in collective action to unlock opportunities to regenerate our world.
We don’t just generate ideas; we act on them. The RSA has been turning world-leading ideas into world-changing actions for more than 260 years. Our research and innovation work has changed the hearts and minds of generations of people. Central to all our work are our mission-aligned Fellows; a global network of 31,000 innovators and changemakers.
About King’s College London
King’s College London is amongst the top 35 universities in the world and top 10 in Europe (THE World University Rankings 2023), and one of England’s oldest and most prestigious universities. With an outstanding reputation for world-class teaching and cutting-edge research, King’s maintained its sixth position for ‘research power’ in the UK (2021 Research Excellence Framework). King’s has more than 33,000 students (including more than 12,800 postgraduates) from some 150 countries worldwide, and some 8,500 staff.
Since its foundation, King’s students and staff have dedicated themselves in the service of society. King’s continues to focus on world-leading education, research and service, and will have an increasingly proactive role to play in a more interconnected, complex world. Visit the website to find out more about Vision 2029, King’s strategic vision to take the university to the 200th anniversary of its founding.
