Ethical Engagement: CSR, Creativity and Education

I've been involved in a book project with a copywriter pal in Madrid exploring ways where advertising is enabling cultural and social change. Not through PSAs or charity work, but through standard communications on the behalf of everyday brands. Pen should be meeting paper soon and there's a bunch of people I want to talk to to offer insight and examples. I want to talk to them about a few recent campaigns I want to focus on as they are shining examples of the power of creativity as an enabler of change. There was a time when brands were all about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and tried to demonstrate how they were responsible and caring and not just there to grab your hard-earned dollars with little care for ecological balance or worker welfare. Finding examples to showcase in this book made me realize how far we have come in a relatively short space of time.

A simplistic explanation can be that brands were adopting CSR too cynically, they were easily caught out by consumers as inauthentic. I remember many a conversation and article about "greenwashing", for instance. The rise of social media has been instrumental in the creation of genuine responsible action on the part of brands. It's so easy to be picked off as a cynic that it's best to actually embrace responsibility and at least do some good. You may even increase shareholder profit as you engage a user base that now sees you as a genuinely good brand. This is the maturing of CSR, as it should be, where brands give back in return for the taking they have always done. Of course, being authentic, particularly when doing good is not a case of donating profits to random charities. CSR must be on-brand. It must come from the very soul of the brand. It must be baked in, kind of paraphrasing Alex Bogusky, but it makes sense to me. And that's where creativity comes in.

Just as an example, BBDO's work for Pedigree dog food demonstrates how you can do good simply by understanding the motivations of your target. After all, all wet dog food in Pedigree's category is essentially the same, not exactly the most nutritional choice, it's decent mid-range mass-market reasonably-priced but not in the "human grade" range by any means. Still, it feeds your dog and it's not particularly dodgy. Pedigree cannot become Taste of the Wild, it wouldn't feel right (almost like Cadbury's buying Green and Blacks to break into the fair trade market without coming across as cynical, ie there was no way the fair trade brigade would have believed in a fair trade Dairy Milk), but they can go do something else without altering the product. They can champion animal rights. And they do this really well, really simply. Sponsoring shelters and drawing awareness to the plight of shelter dogs is a great way to show you genuinely care about your principal users - dogs. It doesn't feel cynical and it helps to create change. It empathizes with their target, dog owners care deeply about dogs, not just their own.

Working round a problem in creative ways is at the heart of our industry and ad ed too. We help our students figure out effective ways to derive insights that lead to scalable big ideas, to multi-platform storytelling. Understanding and empathizing with our target users, feeling the central core of the brand or organization's soul, leads to more engaging work that can make the world a better place. Our students can learn to do this through service learning with non-profits or ethical brands. Service learning, has been identified by IBM as the key driver in preparing students for the workplace as it places an emphasis on learning by doing, in the real world, as opposed to theoretical understanding in a bubble. Service learning, when it involves ethically minded consumer brands, or non profits, through if not a live brief, then an award show contest, can really help students understand how their creativity and their communication skills can be used for good, whilst also doing good by virtue of a campaign that may see the light of day. At the very least they'll have engaged with issues they may not have been aware of before, and they will have practiced their craft in a real world setting.

So back to this book project. My aim is to provide examples of advertising that is genuinely enabling change and to site them within a cultural historical context. These examples may be global in some cases but they will always be the product of US or UK agencies, we are also looking beyond English language campaigns to work produced for the Spanish speaking world. But I don't want to just focus on professionals case studies. I think it's important to also look at how, in ad ed, we create change by educating future agents of change. To this end I would love to hear from anyone involved in the ad industry who have stories to tell about their work and how they may be about doing good as much as making profits, or in ad ed who routinely engage their students through service learning projects with non profits or ethical brands. Reach out, together we can ensure that creativity can change the world (or something similar but less grandiose).