Filed under: Africa, Mother, Nike Foundation | Tags: Mother, Africa, Nike Foundation, Girl Effect, DFID
An independent report by an aid watchdog is critical of Girl Hub – the joint venture between Nike Foundation and DFID. Poor budgeting and financial monitoring, along with weak accountability mechanisms, weak risk management, and the absence of anti-corruption and anti-bribery policies – all of these are concerns, says the watchdog.
When I was doing projects for Girl Hub, it was clear that Nike and DFID are strange bedfellows. Culturally, they couldn’t be more different.
| NIKE CULTURE | DFID CULTURE |
|---|---|
| Obsession with innovation, doing things differently, trying new things, being bold, embracing failure. Impatient. | Focus on risk minimisation, accountability, governance, processes. Highly risk averse – the “do no harm” mantra rules. Slow. |
They’re both very good at what they do – world-class in fact. But they’re from different planets. The joint venture was always an act of genius or craziness.
Girl Hub is trying to unlock a whole new approach to using creativity and communications to lift girls out of poverty. You don’t do this by playing by the book. Creativity isn’t a neat process.
When I was at Mother, the agency often felt on the brink of complete dis-functionality. Yet consistently produced creative and effective work. Yet if this aid watchdog had come to audit Mother, they’d have shut it down.
Girl Hub is spending taxpayers money – of course it should be monitored. But if it’s assessed like any other DFID venture, it won’t achieve anything. If you remove the risk of failure, you probably also remove the innovation.
In the private sector, firms which innovate well accept a high failure rate – especially in the tech sector. The Gates Foundation are reported to expect only 10% of projects to be scaled up – that’s a 90% failure rate.
It’s early days for Girl Hub – only two years in, and just getting into its stride. Andrew Mitchell (International development secretary) being fully supportive – and full credit to him.
Back in 2003, I did a talk at Ogilvy called “Are We All Going To Hell?” – looking at the impacts of advertising, and suggesting we worked in an amoral industry – not morally evil, just morally AWOL.
I was reminded of this by a new report called Think Of Me As Evil by the Public Interest Research Centre and WWF-UK.
If you’re wondering about the slightly strange title of their report, it comes from a quote by Rory Sutherland, ex-president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, and a former colleague of mine at Ogilvy. He said:
The truth is that marketing raises enormous ethical questions every day—at least it does if you’re doing it right. If this were not the case, the only possible explanations are either that you believe marketers are too ineffectual to make any difference, or you believe that marketing activities only affect people at the level of conscious argument.
Neither of these possibilities appeals to me. I would rather be thought of as evil than useless.
The report derives its name from this quote, and opens with it. It’s a shame to feel the need to cast a villain, in what is otherwise a valuable and provocative piece of research.
We all agree on the undesirable impacts of advertising: everything from negative self-image to the debt crisis and climate change can be credibly linked to advertising in some way. It’s something that genuinely needs to be looked at. However, I have a few questions.
- First, can you really isolate advertising from broader consumer culture? Cause/effect? Isn’t the real problem our rapacious “I shop therefore I am” society – of which advertising is a symptom, as much as a cause?
- Second, are consumers really docile masses waiting to be programmed by the clever persuaders? Consumers aren’t innocents in this, there is as much “pull” as there is “push”.
- Third, are we attacking a fading force, as the advertising industry itself opines its decline? Aren’t social factors and cultural norms becoming greater determinants of behaviour, at least in the developed markets?
- Fourth, can’t advertising be used for good? Like any tool, it’s not intrinsically good or bad: what about the long-running and successful UK drink drive campaign, or work in Africa to make families feel it’s a good thing for girls to go to school?
It’s a shame to go straight into an attack-and-defend mode of dialogue. Something I’ve learnt since moving into corporate work: quickly get above “good and evil”. Don’t polarise people from the outset. Of course Georgie Monbiot will write about it, but the people who count will tune it out.
People like Rory Sutherland. He and I don’t agree on politics, for sure – but I know he’s a big advocate of the power of communications as a positive social tool, and one of the most influential industry voices. Did anyone actually speak to him before writing this? Or his industry peers? They shouldn’t be the enemy of this report, but the point of it.
Images from my other old ad agency, Mother – a Kruger inspired campaign for Selfridges (source).
Filed under: Advertising, Climate Change, Mother | Tags: Advertising, Climate Change, Mother, Plane Stupid
The phrase “viral video”, I think, is a bit dated – alongside “dial-up” and “millennium bug”. That is, unless you’ve been nominated for the Viral Video Award 2010. Apparently out of 500 submissions, 20 were selected for the public vote – including our Polar Bear ad for Plane Stupid. Liking viral.
The film got over a million views on YouTube – more than any of the other nominees, as far as I can tell (doesn’t this mean we already won the public vote?!). The truth is, this success has nothing much to do with “viral”. It has more to do with the press storm that started in The Telegraph and ended in a Fox News rant by Glenn Beck. A proud moment. He said:
“This is despicable and obviously designed to frighten you and your children”
Now, if that isn’t a reason to click here and vote then what is? Seriously, all support would be much appreciated. The winner gets screened at the prestigious International Short Film Festival Berlin. Which will, of course, be a great excuse not to take a short-haul flight… Voting ends on November 18th.
Filed under: Mother
Three weeks left at Mother. I resigned without any particular plan – but this has unlocked a whole range of conversations and connections I wouldn’t have had otherwise. It’s been my own small act of creative destruction – a phrase that’s been in my head a lot recently.
So I Googled it. I’ll spare you the Hindu mysticism, the Tagore poems and Nietzsche philosophy (though if you’re interested, try Creative Destruction: Portrait of an Idea). The phrase was coined by the economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe the driving force of capitalism.
The current tech sector is a great example. As Morgan Stanley reports, we’re in the midst of an the unprecedented rate of innovation: cost-cutting pressures may slow down some technologies, but they fuel others, such as cloud computing and mobile working. As Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told the NYT , “our model is not for a quick rebound. Our model is things go down, and then they reset”. That’s creative destruction: not just a rebound, but a reboot.
Last week I had breakfast with Jon Alexander, and we talked about the upsides of the downturn. He calls this the “greatest creative opportunity in history” – an opportunity to overturn old habits. to reset our values. Maybe start a few riots. So I did some more Googling. There are causes for optimism:
- a huge increase in volunteering
- much talk about a redefinition of living well and a return to family values
- evidence of people finding new ways to get happiness out of their cash.
I worry that much of this is feel-good “Big Society” chattering classes stuff: it hides the real pain of the recession. I found Alan Greenspan talking about this to the Senate: “the problem with creative destruction is that is is destruction, and a very considerable amount of turmoil goes on in the process”.
For me, there hasn’t really been any turmoil – thankfully, it’s been an inspiring couple of months. Yes, I’ve enjoyed working at Mother, but no regrets about pressing “reset”. I’ve not started any riots yet – but well, early days.
Image of Mother London at Google Maps
I once dragged myself to Central Park to watch the Dalai Lama speak. I remember trying to focus on this distant little man through the fug of a hangover. He talked about New Yorker’s favourite words: I, me, mine.
Well, I just spent the week at Mother New York, and also met up with a few folk from some other interesting agencies. Something’s definitely changing. The cool creative idealism is still there, but it’s fusing with a growing sense of social idealism: a touch of we, us and ours.
- At Anomaly, Johnny Vulkan talked about expanding his philosophy of branded utility from “what’s the utility of this brand for me?” to “what’s this brand doing for us?”. People want to see brands making a positive contribution to the world. Dan Cherry says this needs to start from a strong sense of a brand’s conviction. As he puts it, “we don’t work with brands who don’t know who the fuck they are”.
- Ilana Bryant, the CSO at Strawberry Frog, talksed about creating cultural movements around brands, connecting them to a bigger conversation, giving them an organizing ideal. It’s similar to Mother’s own “Culture Back” philosophy.
- I caught up with my former co-conspirator Alnoor, now strategy director of Purpose, a fast-growing agency set up entirely to facilitate pro-social movements and communities.
- Droga 5 have done more than anyone to show the way here: the Tap Project and The Million are both great examples of creative entrepreneurship, and their contribution to the Obama campaign – Sarah Silverman’s The Great Schlep – was inspired.
New York is a city that loves it’s own cliches: creativity, money, ambition. Maybe there are some new cliches in the making: some of the smartest people in this city are starting the move from me to we. Maybe people are waking up to the fact that, in the world of business, creative idealism without social integrity is just masturbation.
Image at Google Maps.
Filed under: Mother, Youth | Tags: football, Mother, sport, World Cup 2010, Youth
Mother’s finest have been playing a bit of football in East London. Not Shoreditch, but South Africa. It’s one of the poorest areas in the country, and this trip was the start of a long-term legacy project with the village of Chintsa.
It’s a Mother tradition to celebrate the big football tournaments with a creative project. This year we decided to do it with a social twist. So, we picked a team from Mother’s three global offices, and sent them to South Africa to play against local teams. It was a chance to get involved with local communities, and find out about the problems they face.
There are some great projects in South Africa, working with young people and using football as a force for change:
- Kick4Life runs innovative sport programs that provide opportunities and inspiration for young people.
- SCORE uses sport to provide children and youth with skills like communication and teamwork.
- Africaid has a youth programme called WhizzKids United that provides HIV/AIDS prevention, care, treatment worldwide through football.
- Grassroot Soccer is a global initiative using the power of soccer in the fight against HIV and AIDS.
Our team witnessed the power of the game to bring a community together: over 1,000 people watched the final game – the township had never seen so many local white people. As Dylan wrote on the Twitter feed: “Music played,people danced,everyone laughed and sang.A community came together for the evening around a dust patch 22 guys and a ball”.
In the end the legacy seemed obvious: provide a focal point where the community can come together regularly – and so that’s the plan: build a sports and community centre in the Chintsa township, with a multipurpose grass pitch, floodlights, stand, and changing rooms. It will be a place where community groups can meet, and where initiatives like Kick4Life and SCORE can run their projects.
Something to be proud of. We’ll update on the progress on this blog.
Images from Mother’s World Cup photostream.
Filed under: Climate Change, Economics, Ethical Consumerism, Happiness, Innovation, Mother, Public Opinion, Uncategorized | Tags: Advertising, Climate Change, Environment, Happiness, health, Innovation, Mother, New Economics Foundation, Public Opinion
Yesterday Nic Marks from the New Economics Foundation came in to Mother and talked to the strategists. Nic works on well-being and how to measure it, and he started by telling us that he thought people like us – advertising types – fuel the false belief that stuff can make us happy. In fact, Nic wasn’t initially at all keen to come and talk to us – a reminder that to many people, we’re the problem.
I was digging around on their website and found this, in a report called A Bit Rich, which calculates the “Social Return On Investment” of different jobs:
The impact of the [advertising] industry has always been a point of controversy. It encourages high consumer spending and indebtedness. It can create insatiable aspirations, fuelling feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress. In our economic model we estimate the share of social and environmental damage caused by overconsumption that is attributable to advertising. For a salary of between £50,000 and £12 million, top advertising executives destroy £11 of value for every pound in value they generate.
Reminds me of the famous Bill Hicks line, “by the way, if anyone here tonight is in advertising or marketing… kill yourselves. Just a little thought”. In fact, I just watched it again. It’s really old now, but great to see again:
Yeah, well. It’s not like we sell arms to children or anything. Of course there’s nothing intrinsically evil about marketing, but the collective indifference of our industry is impressive. Still, I’m convinced this is changing for the better. A few people yesterday pointed out NEF’s slogan, “Economics As If People and the Planet Mattered” – something to think about for us.
So there was a bit of a cultural tension going on. Despite this (or maybe because of it), it was a great talk. Plenty of good nerdy discussion on indices, measurement, systems theory, psychology – finishing with the beautifully practical Five Ways To Wellbeing: Connect, Be Active (physically), Take Notice (smelling coffee, etc), Keep Learning, and Give (compassion, Dalai Lama style). If this all sounds a bit “self-help”, there’s some solid evidence behind this stuff. And some good heart too. It would be nice to figure out some ways we can do some projects with these guys.
And if you’re interested, here’s the full presentation:
Filed under: Drugs, FRANK, Mother, Social Media, Uncategorized, Youth | Tags: cocaine, Drugs, FRANK, legal highs, mephedrone, Social Media, Youth
We’re now almost at 190,000 fans on Pablo’s Facebook page, part of the FRANK campaign. It’s become a real community, and since the beginning one of the main topics has been mephedrone – or meph, or MCAT, or cat piss, or bubble, or plant fertilizer, or whatever you want to call it.
Mephedrone has been in the news following two deaths this week. It’s currently one of a number of legal drugs, which has prompted a predictable furore (“The Death Drug We Can’t Police“, etc). Mandelson promised to look into it “very speedily” (perhaps not his finest choice of adverb).
We’ve been exploring communications around the “legal highs”, and developed the Crazy Chemist campaign (above), which ran in clubs last year. There are new chemicals being developed/synthesized/distributed all the time – it’s cat and mouse. We needed a proposition that can cover all of them. We found some crazy people out there pushing the envelope. This post from one of the mephedrone pioneers, a chemist calling himself Kinetic:
i’ve been bored over the last couple of days and had a few fun reagents lying around, so i thought i’d try and make some 1-(4-methylphenyl)-2-methylaminopropanone hydrochloride, or 4-methylmethcathinone. [...] I was a bit scared about what snorting 50mg might do, but since I’ve been almost constantly abusing the (badly synthesised) 1-phenyl-2-methylaminobutan-1-one, 50mg didn’t do too much. I thought I’d wasted my time until I snorted another 100mg about 30 minutes later, and then it hit me. Intense rushes all over, lasting for well over 30 minutes.
That was in 2004. Legal highs like mephedrone find their way into the clubs, and then out into the mainstream. In 2008, mephedrone didn’t even have a Wikipedia page – now it’s easily to order online. A Google trends search shows the steady growth of interest in mephedrone over the last 12 months:
We did some qualitative work with users, and found the growth of legal highs is part of a bigger picture: “escapism is back”, as our researcher Steve Lacey puts it. Drug use is always part of a bigger drug culture, and Steve thinks that an impulse to get “out of it” is a growing response to the recession. Platform magazine agrees:
Down with shiny women, washing and cocaine, up with bad tattoos and stealing tranquilizers from pony club. Economy drug experimentation is reaching a new socially acceptable high.
Maybe this is why the current national panic over mephedrone isn’t focused on the cities, but in deprived rural areas, as reported in the latest Druglink. For example, in Teesdale, mephedrone use was triggered by a police crackdown on local cocaine dealers, as sgt Michael Urwin explains:
From what we can gather, it started from one lad in Cockfield watching a BBC3 documentary about legal highs. He’s gone on the internet and bought some mephedrone. Then he bought in bulk, sold to his mates in the village and from there it traveled to the neighbouring village of Evenwood, then onto the towns of Barnard Castle, Bishop Auckland and eventually Darlington. I think it’s a case of an enterprising, if that’s the right word, teenager who thought ‘how can I get round this lack of cocaine’.
So, it’s the BBC’s fault. This is the risk that communications face: talk to much about it and you stimulate demand. That’s why Crazy Chemist was targeting clubs environments. But we may be seeing a perfect storm of drug use: a growing desire for escapism; cheap and easy access online; police are turning the screws on cocaine and ecstasy supply, and prices are rising. Banning mephedrone may (or may not) solve the government’s mephedrone problem, but you can bet the next batch of legal highs are ready and waiting.
Filed under: Education, Innovation, Microdonations, Mother, Social Enterprise, Social Exclusion, Uncategorized, Youth | Tags: Innovation, Microdonations, Mother, Social Enterprise, Social Exclusion, Youth
We held the latest of our UnLtd brand clinics at Mother this week. They’re always energized sessions – a couple of social enterprises really grabbed us.
One was the Hip Hop Shakespeare Company, set up by rapper Akala to work with disengaged young people, getting them excited about words and rhyming. Another was MOTIV, which works in schools to incentivize kids to turn up – like the Million project, but teaching the value of attendance at the same time as rewarding them.
Social enterprise keeps on booming. Micro-funding sites continue growing, such as Pledge Bank in the UK and Kickstarter in the US. Gordon Brown has been talking about this for a while now. Last week saw David Cameron sign up to No More Business As Usual, which has some interesting facts:
- Social enterprises contribute £24 billion to the economy.
- They’re twice as confident of future growth as traditional small and medium enterprises.
- Since the economic downturn began, 56% have increased their turnover.
But the real value is in the work they do – addressing social exclusion, fighting health inequalities, revitalizing local sports, inspiring kids to go to school. The optimism and imagination in some of these enterprises is exceptional. In our current economy of malaise, we should be paying attention.
I’ve been invited along to a Westminster “policy seminar” on this subject – the blurb reads “social entrepreneurs can be part of a new partnership between citizen and state and, given the right support, they have the potential to be a major force for social and economic good in this country”. Who’s going to say no to that…
Image from njohnson0920.
