Reimagining Advertising: Taking steps towards new ways of operating
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 DDBO, media agency OMD, media owner Channel 4, awards body D&AD and insight agency Kantar — to embark on a 6-month learning journey to reimagine the future of the industry, supported by research partner Kings College London.
This blog post is part 4 of a series, following on from part 1: our introduction, part 2: reflections from our early sessions, and part 3: reflections from the sessions following. It summarises the concluding parts of the journey: a panel at the Eden Project’s Anthropy conference, where several participants joined Purpose Disruptors to discuss Reimagining Advertising, and our final formal session with the cohort at the RSA.
While the six-month learning journey may be wrapping up, much of the work is only just beginning. Now in 2024, the cohort are taking their practice into their own hands with a continued peer learning format that involves monthly meetings, peer coaching and idea development. Sustained peer learning is a powerful way of supporting seeds of change to take root and proliferate.
Purpose Disruptors will continue to document their journey into 2024, including a more detailed analysis of the Reimagining Advertising journey and output in the form of a white paper (coming Spring 2024.)
We’ll also be sharing perspectives from our convening partner the RSA, and research partner Kings College London, as well as the leaders themselves. Watch this space!
A Reimagining Advertising Panel at Anthropy
Now in its second year, the Anthropy summit convenes leaders across public, private and non-profit sectors, with a shared intention to build a better future for the UK. After an invitation to speak in its inaugural year, we knew it was the perfect platform to share early insights on how an ecosystem like advertising might transform itself.
For the 2023 event we were invited to chair & curate a panel, and invited the RSA and members of the Reimagining Advertising cohort to join us and share what they’ve learned about systems change through Reimagining Advertising.
Lisa chaired the event with Jahnvi Singh, Senior Learning Designer at the RSA, as well as cohort members Emily Simons, Kantar’s Associate Director of Sustainable Transformation, Dara Lynch, D&AD’s COO, alongside Purpose Disruptors Ireland lead Laura Costello and MG/OMD’s Head of Content & Responsible Media, Tim Pritchard.
The RSA’s Jahnvi Singh set up the conversation by explaining how systems work, and where we can find leverage points for change:
“An industry is a system. Environmentalist and system activist Donella Meadows defines a system as a collection of units. So that may be people or organisations that form such deep relationships and interconnections with each other that at some point, they start producing their own patterns of behaviour over time. And a system is comprised not only of those individual units but also what flows between them: their power, finances, resources, information and knowledge. To bring about a shift or a change in these complex systems, we have to find the leverage points: the points of possibility or the cracks through which a little bit of light comes in. These leverage points, even if nudged in a small way through a small action, practice or idea, have the potential to form ripple effects across the industry.”
While we’re trained to pay attention to our individual advancement in the system, applying a systems lens means cultivating awareness of our particular role, resources, networks in the context of the wider whole. RA cohort members Dara and Emily spoke to this new way of seeing. “As an awards body, part of D&AD’s role in the world is to stimulate a redefining of creative excellence. What does creative excellence look like today? And if we don’t consider it in the context of the climate emergency, we’re not going to transform the industry,” observed Dara.
Emily similarly shared the power that her company, insight consultancy Kantar, holds in effecting transformation across the wider advertising ecosystem. “As insight providers, our role is really to deeply understand people, what they care about and why they do certain things. And through that insight and understanding we can essentially help brands and agencies identify what they can do to support people.”
Jahnvi explained why deep work with select industry trailblazers can often be a super powerful systems intervention, if it supports them in enacting their visions:
“Trailblazers offer those glimpses of a potential new emerging future in the now, because they’ve already started sensing those points of possibility around them. They’re already revealing hidden barriers or illuminating and spotlighting different ways of thinking being and doing, but they can’t do it alone. Often, they play very unique roles. But if we were to connect them, and if we were to equip these trailblazers with the capabilities — to care more deeply, to ask more radical questions, and form partnerships with each other — then we could support them in catalysing that change even further.”
Tim and Laura, both long-term Purpose Disruptors collaborators, were able to offer a long view on what kinds of change are possible from different places within the system. Speaking from the media agency perspective, Tim observed, “we have a pivotal bridging role — working really closely with media partners, and with clients. There are concepts we need to move away from as an industry. We can’t be monetizing people’s time by effectively stealing it — so as middlemen, we need to make sure we’re pushing through the supply chain to root that out.”
Laura shared a live example of advertising reimagined: her agency, Thinkhouse, secured funding from the Irish Government to explore new narratives of a Good Life with Purpose Disruptors Ireland. “It’s scary because it’s taxpayers’ money so we need to do a really good job, but it’s also new, so we really don’t know where it’s going to go,” she observed. This is a fascinating case study of securing a new income stream that evidences the value of imagining beyond today’s revenue models. (We’ll share more on PD Ireland’s progress on upcoming blogs.)
Reimagining Advertising has been an emergent process aiming to support an ecosystem of trailblazers across the industry to vision and embed new practices in their organisations, and the wider system. While the impact is still to surface, D&AD’s Dara shared her optimism for the process: “I think the collaborations that will come out of this process are seeds of hope, that can become much bigger ideas. As an awards body, we can offer amplification for some of these ideas in many different ways.”
Takeaways from the Anthropy panel
- “Reimagining advertising” might sound like a lofty goal, but systems thinking offers a clear logic for working with points of possibility and supporting trailblazers to take advantage of them. Donella Meadows’ “Leverage Points: Places to Intervene within a System” offers great insight on this. (Further resources to come in our next blog.)
- Sharing these processes widely, however emergent, is a valuable practice for others. Our panel at Anthropy drew an audience of practitioners from unrelated industries, who were keen to explore similar principles in their own sectors and work.
Session 5 — Finding a Path Forward
The week following Anthropy, we came together for our final formal session at the Royal Society of Arts in London’s Piccadilly.
After 4 sessions learning about systems and our place in them, exploring how change happens, then imagining and developing experiments to alter the system, this was a chance to practise operationalising early experiments and reflect on the process so far.
To guide our session, we were delighted to have Dr Orit Gal, Senior Lecturer for Strategy & Complexity at London’s Regents University, who was with us for our very first session introducing systems thinking.
Each member of the cohort had a seed card — an articulation of an idea they’d like to bring to life, developed over the previous two sessions. Using two of the seed cards as examples, we divided the group in half to practise building out seeds into fully fledged pitches, with prompts from Orit:
- Who is going to be interested in this idea? (Think widely.) This is your network of supporters & allies.
- For whom does this indirectly solve a problem? How could it be pitched into them as something worth supporting?
- What does a Minimum Viable Product of this idea look like?
With only an hour of development time, this was an exercise in pace and lateral thinking. But by the time we pitched, each team had a coherent, widely networked plan for operationalising each seed — plans that are now gestating back in their host teams & ecosystems. Having rehearsed on the two example seeds, the cohort were then able to take away methods for developing their own ideas outside of the container of Reimagining Advertising.
If it feels like we’re being coy about the content of this session, we are — to give the ideas breathing room to grow with the right support. We’ll be back soon to share more detail on the ideas this program has generated, but hope that sharing our process has proved useful in these blogs.
Takeaways from session 5
- A “yes and” rule and a tight timeline to game out new ideas helps keep our natural naysaying instincts at bay. Once ideas exist, it’s far easier to mould and edit.
- A certain dose of maverick thinking is helpful to open up new possibilities. Orit’s question “for whom does this indirectly solve a problem?” unlocked all kinds of unexpected possible allies who might seem resistant at first glance.
So, what now?
Session 5 concluded the formal part of the Reimagining Advertising learning journey, but the cohort continues on into 2024. We’ll share more from our partners at the RSA and Kings, as well as the cohort themselves, in further blog updates, and publish our full white paper in Spring 2024.
Thank you so much to everyone who’s been a part of this experimental journey with us — it’s been emergent, rewarding and above all deeply hopeful. We’d love to hear your comments & reflections — get in touch at hello@purposedisruptors.org.
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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 change-makers.
