Advertising is killing the planet. But Sustainability could learn a lot from adland.
Nature on the Board (in which Faith In Nature became the first company in the world to make Nature a director) isn’t an idea that emerged from sustainability circles. It’s an idea that came from two ad creatives — me and my creative partner, Anne Hopkins — feeling uncomfortable in our role as directors of Faith In Nature, making decisions that impact Nature without somehow giving Nature a say in those decisions.
Together, we’ve tackled all kinds of creative briefs at all kinds of creative agencies. And, together, we sit on the board of Faith In Nature as Creative Directors. But twenty years in adland didn’t really prepare us for answering questions on plastics, on oils, on emissions, on footprints, on pathways to net zero or whatever else was on the board agenda.
Nature on the Board was really just the product of the same creative processes we apply to all other creative briefs, underpinned by our shared love of the natural world. But Nature on the Board has quickly spread through sustainability circles — and the result is that so have we. And what we’ve come to realise is this:
The sustainability world could learn a lot from the advertising world.
Yes, advertising is ruining everything and, yes, it’s killing the planet.
But advertising has also figured out something that the sustainability industry hasn’t. It’s figured out how to make people care. (It had to, right? Because most people don’t really care about most things companies want to tell them.)
And while there are endless books on advertising theory — full of funnels and pyramids and overlapping circles — the key to the best advertising wouldn’t sell many books. It’s this:
- Put the most creative people you can in a room together
- Put money behind their ideas
Contrary to what you might imagine (if you’ve never worked in advertising), advertising is actually full of kind, caring, insightful, brilliant people. But if advertising is so evil, then why?
Mostly, I think, for the love of the creative process.
The ad agency sausage factory goes a bit like this:
- Account Handling (The diplomats. They handle the client/agency relationship.)
- Planning (The strategists. They throw in research, data, trends and insight to translate the client’s wants into a workable creative brief.)
- Creative (The creators. Where the briefs get turned into ideas.)
- Production (The doers. Where creative ideas become reality.)
I’m being overly simplistic with the diplomats/strategists/creators/doers bit, but it’s there to illustrate the point that creative agencies actually have all kinds of different people within them — in a system designed to optimise creativity and increase creative output.
Because there would be no point to any of this process, or the ad agency structure, if it wasn’t centred around the creative department. This is where business input gets turned into cultural output. It’s where business speak and research and powerpoint decks get translated into stuff people actually like. It’s where things become human.
From what we’ve seen since launching Nature on the Board into the world, the Sustainability industry is full of wonderful, caring, smart people too. Of course it is! It needs to be.
But we’ve also left many sustainability conferences, meetings and talks either deflated or enraged at the the high level talk and lack of obvious output. In ad agency terms, it’s felt like being in a room full of strategists. A Talk Club without the structure in place to hand that strategy over to the creative department, let alone get it into production. Thoughts that never make it out of the strategy department are, at best, wasted. At worst, they’re a waste of time (when time isn’t on our side).
Because the one thing the sustainability movement needs is to humanise its thinking as ad creatives humanise commercial strategy. All the cleverness of strategy is not so clever after all if it does not take the next step towards simplifying something, explaining something, making people feel something, changing something or causing people to act.
That’s not to say the sustainability industry isn’t also brimming with creativity. Every single Earthshot entry proves that it is. But where is the intersect between these multi million dollar talk-shops and the Earthshotters? And why should the Earthshotters have to apply for charitable grants to get their ideas off the ground anyway?
Imagine instead an environment, much like an advertising agency, but focussed on a different creative output. And that output is positive change.
Each stage of the sausage factory would need rethinking — but the most fundamental change of all rests with those feeding in the briefs. ie: the clients. The companies themselves. Because it’s the expectation of what will come out at the end that guides the process. If the expectation is not set as ‘an ad’, then what comes out won’t need to be ‘an ad’.
It would probably mean fewer briefs coming from marketing departments and more from sustainability departments instead. Those briefs could ask for anything from increases in biodiversity to greater environmental education. Or deep systems change, such as Nature on the Board.
If those briefs carried with them the same budgets that advertising does, creative agencies would very quickly rebuild themselves.
- Account Handling (Still managing the client/agency relationship — but now driving a different agenda.)
- Planning (All those sustainability strategists now working within an efficient system where their thinking doesn’t just fill conference rooms but informs actual output.)
- Creative (Free at last not to think in terms of ways to sell stuff, but ways to change stuff.)
- Production (The Doers. Like the Earthshotters.)
Good producers run through brick walls to make great ideas happen. The more challenging the creative idea, the more a good producer wants to crack it. But because the client input would bedifferent, then what we think of as production output needs to change too. In Nature on the Board’s case, the producers were Nature Lawyers: Lawyers For Nature and Earth Law Center. And, I suspect, environmental lawyers have a huge part to play here. But the producers could also be engineers, farmers, manufacturers, foresters, architects, accountants…
…or really whoever is best placed to deliver on the creative idea. We all have a role to play.
And the ideas coming out the other end might look a bit more like this:
A wonderful South African initiative that pays out royalties to lion conservation charities whenever imagery or footage of lions is used to commercial ends. It highlights the absurdity of using the natural world to sell products which go onto destroy the natural world.
Riffing on a similar theme, Earth Percent acknowledges the role Nature plays in song-writing, arguing that the natural world is a co-writer in so much musical output and should, therefore, be paid royalties for its role.
(You can see where this is going, right? It very quickly becomes apparent that literally everything we do is reliant upon and interconnected with Nature — and Nature should be rewarded for its role in this. It’s this fundamental shift from seeing Nature as a resource to Nature as originator, collaborator and facilitator that is at the heart of the Rights of Nature movement.)
And, of course, there’s the Climate Stripes — the most powerful piece of design to emerge from sustainability circles that simply, and beautifully, makes clear the situation we’re all facing and in which we’re all complicit. Every creative agency on the planet probably wishes they’d come up with it — and they could have done if what they were being asked to do was different.
The advertising industry is an $800bn/year industry. The reason businesses should take this potential creative realignment just as seriously is not only because what could pop out at the end is desperately needed — but it will do more for a brand than an ad ever could.
Nature on the Board has been seen by 750 million people around the world so far. It’s put a small soap company from Manchester on the map and on the same stages as Patagonia.
That doesn’t mean Nature on the Board is an ad. It isn’t. But it borrowed a lot from advertising thinking.
- Faith In Nature asked for change, not an ad.
- The strategy was as simple as realising making Nature positive choices is impossible with Nature’s voice in the room.
- The creative was the idea that popped into Anne’s head: “What if Nature really was the boss?”
- And the production was mainly the brilliant work of Lawyers for Nature.
It’s created a whole new way of doing business.
….and it’s creating awareness levels waaaaaaaaay beyond Faith In Nature’s marketing budgets ever could.
