Brittaney Kiefer writes the long read in this week’s Campaign, with a round up of current thoughts in our industry, and what comes after Create and Strike.
[excerpt]… “Taking the path that [Iain] Tait and others describe would give advertising a bigger purpose than just selling more stuff. The industry has already begun to shift in this direction, as seen in the recent craze around cause-driven marketing. But as with those types of campaigns, which at their worst merely serve as window-dressing for brands, there is a danger that ad agencies will address the climate crisis as a box-ticking exercise, without undertaking the systemic change that it calls for.
“There are too many things that feel like CEOs signing bits of paper that don’t result in anything,” Tait cautions. To begin with, agencies “need to get our own house in order”, he adds. Adland has some notoriously unsustainable practices, from frequent air travel to generating waste on film shoots. Organisations such as AdGreen, which advocates for environmentally sustainable production methods, are trying to lead a transition to a greener industry.
Implementing such measures might mean agencies have more of a leg to stand on when encouraging their clients to develop environmentally sustainable strategies. Green activities, long confined to the fringes of business, should be “put front and centre in the way a brand expresses itself”, Tait says. Williams suggests that agencies should help clients shape their marketing goals “through the prism of the Extinction agenda, and sign it off at board level”.
“If every Fortune 500 or S&P 500 company followed suit, you would then start to cultivate a second age of consumer culture, where companies recognise that ethical consumerism isn’t a niche constituency of consumers. It’s actually a driver of mass demand,” he says.”
Read the whole article here…
