Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium BetoBina

Marketing and advertising were ranked as one of the 4 least valuable professions to humanity.

I heard the stat from Afdhel Aziz, author of Good is the New Cool. He continues: “And people that work in these industries are more than twice as likely to say that. There’s a deep crisis of the work we do and what we add in society”.

The most awarded this year at Cannes Lions, Fearless Girl, stands for Gender Equality. (photo: AdWeek)

Our industry is already moving from a message-to-consumption perspective, to understanding emerging behaviors and create services, products and communication that give brands a meaningful role in culture. Add to that the investment and the smart people, I believe our industry is one of the most powerful forces to make an impact in society.

But there is still a big disconnect between what marketers believe, and the power we have in our hands. But times are changing.

The good news is that ‘Good’ is getting recognized by key leaders in our industry. From businesses pushing more CSR initiatives to the surface, to the most important award in the industry, Cannes Lions.

I’ve done an exercise analyzing all the Grand Prix and Gold Lions of 2017, and found that 116 projects awarded had a social cause as a theme. I also organized them inspired by the UN’s sustainable development goals to see which causes were the real winners.

Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutes. It was the winner cause of this year. Issues like refugees from war, domestic violence and corruption counted 28 projects among GPs and Gold winners. Great examples are “Boost Your Voice”, “Payphone bank” and “Humanium Metal”. It was also the theme of the Grand Prix for Good, the beautiful “The Refugee Nation”.

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Goal 10: Reduced Inequalities. The second cause with most awards, 25 in total, approached themes related with race, age, ethinicity, disabilities, gender, LGBT+. Main winners were “We are Superhumans”, “DNA journey” and R/GA’s “Love Has No Labels”.

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Goal 3: Good health and well being. I’ve counted 17 out of all GPs and Golds Lions, winners were “ManBoobs4Boobs” and “Addict’aide”. Also, two of my favorites “Healthy Hands Chalk” and the GP in Health and Cyber, “Meet Graham”.

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Goal 5: Gender equality had 12 cases winning GP or Gold, topic approaching discrimination against women was also the Titanium GP with “Fearless Girl”, followed by other beautiful projects as “Equality signs” and “Writing our Rights”.

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It seems we are on the right track…

However, from all the Grand Prix and Gold lions, only 43% were from ‘for-profit’ companies, all the other 57% were from non-profits organizations.

This can leads us to the conclusion that it’s easier to make creative work for pro-bono clients. But also that we are not finding the right opportunities to incorporate social causes into our day-to-day clients.

In order to solve the second problem, I looked at the main ‘for-profit’ projects to find patterns and possible ways for marketers and designers to help brands own, promote or engage with a cause:

The need behind the behavior: going one step further to understand people’s actions. The reason for to travel in the “DNA Journey” and to shave in the “Handle with care” inspired different solutions, and the connection with bautiful causes.
Lowering barriers: make it easier and embed the service into existing behaviors. That’s how “Payphone Bank” helped people save, and “Aland Bank” made people compensate their carbon emissions.
Pain points around usage: not just looking at the use of a product, but what’s around that moment. What users do and don’t do, before and after using the product. “Share the load”, “Care Counts” and “Healthy Hands Chalk” explored non-conventional use cases for their categories.
Make it fun and magical: add a layer on top of commom behaviors and situations of usage, like “VR Vaccine” and “Art Beats Hate”.
Overlap with culture by doing: many brands are trying to own a cause without foundation, generating big fails and criticism. Brands that got it right made a bold statements, letting their actions do the talk, examples are “Libé des Réfugies”, “Borders” from AeroMexico and “LO & Behold”.
The circular economy of your brand: understand how the whole process works, and find opportunities to reduce, reuse, refurbish or recycle. Best examples are “The Never-Ending Forest App”, “Tiger Air Ink” and “Fairphone”.

But if wait to change an industry in order to change ourselves takes too long.

An alternative is to not wait for it, but go after.

I’m part of Papel & Caneta, a non profit created by André Chaves which does exactly that, connects people from the creative industry to become an ambassador and a machine for the creation of empathy. In our network we have people like Matt Eastwood, Jean Batthany, Aaron Duffy, Morihiro Harano, Sarah Watson, Laura Bambach, Jess Greenwood, Tim Claassen and many others.

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We also have a framework that has been helping us to develop the work. So, feel free to use it. Would be great to put it out to test as much as possible and refine it:

People are our briefs: instead of working with NGOs, we start looking for a person that has a beautiful cause. One of the latest to join us was Lidiya Yankovskaya, conductor and artistic director from the Refugee Orchestra Project.
Create a mission: together with this person, we create a mission that gives a clear direction and inspires the team to solve what we call “Invisible problems”, causes that are often forgotten.
Gang for good: build a diverse and excited group of people, from activists immersed in the cause, to leaders of the creative industry and makers that love to get their hands dirty.
Inject people into an experiece: projects are fast and intense. We start with inspirations sessions, moving to an intense weekend of brainstorms and discussions, to an execution that can’t take more than a week.

There’s no brands os sponsors involved, it’s exhausting, it has no funding — people from the network supports when needed — but it does make us proud to being able to use our energy to do Good. Feel free to watch the project we did in NYC last May. It was officially launched in partnership with Upworthy on June 17th, same day Cannes started.

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To finish, If I would give you my latest piece of advice, would be to pick a cause that you are passionate about and dive deep into it (check the UN goals). Go to events (Eventbrite and MeetUp), make online courses (Coursera) and let people know about it. When you own a cause, it will intrinsically reminds you of opportunities to integrate that into you work.

Hope you have enjoyed the article. Feel free to recommend projects that I might have missed or suggest ways to approach social causes. I wish you can be proud and share the ❤ for ‘Good’ advertising.

Who is proud to work in the Ad industry? was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Who is proud to work in the Ad industry?

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