For three days last week, I camped out at the Social Good
Summit at the 92nd Street Y on New York’s Upper East Side, not far
from where the UN was rumbling to a start and bringing gridlock to the
streets. I attended to get a better
sense of the relationship between cause marketing, content marketing and brand
marketing as these terms are gaining currency. I got more than I bargained for.
From a distance, the event did not seem all that auspicious
as it had the UN branding all over it—no offense. My first and only dealing with the UN was
decades ago when I edited Pedal Power for
Work, Leisure and Transportation. The
book, a Rodale outlier, with contributions from professors at MIT and Oxford
University, included information on how to use pedal power to draw water from
deep wells. This use case was intended
primarily for Africa. Long story short: I went to the appropriate UN committee asking
for a $100,000 for test cases in sub-Sahara Africa. Someone
told me they couldn’t consider anything under $10 million. I was going through my “back-to-the-land” and
“small is beautiful” period and wasn’t sufficiently schooled in Big Ideas.
The Social Good Summit seemed like a version of speed-dating
on steroids, with dozens of sessions presented each day concurrently with no
breaks and no coffee. I haven’t been
able to reach the organizers to ask why such a schedule, so I assume that the
unrelenting drum-roll of speakers was necessary because there is so much good
to spread around. I was on my way to
becoming a believer.
I’ve been to hundreds of conferences and organized a fair
number myself but remember few. I’m not
exactly sure of the reason for this, other than my shrinking brain. Most events are pro forma, put on by associations that have constituencies to
appease. Understandably, the agenda
might go down like yesterday’s gruel. And
if it’s warmed over digital, it’s still gruel.
The Social Good Summit seemed to touch deeper roots. To borrow from psychology: there was
something archetypal afoot.
I got a clearer understanding of the title for this
conference after sitting in a crowded theater with 1,000 attendees; many of
them, it seemed, were Millennials. And
of this group a high percentage were women.
As the Summit would show, this group brings new ideas, technologies and
a social consciousness to the ills of our country and world. After bearing reluctant witness to the
political clown show in Washington DC, it was refreshing to be in a room where
the operative worlds were compassion and service. I thought of the poet Auden’s longing for new
styles of architecture and a change of heart. I thought about Pope Francis’ recent remarks about
understanding the “other,” bringing an anima consciousness to the Papacy, a
genuine embrace of the feminine for the first time in memory.
I go on, of course, but this feeling was in the air. The event, which reached 120 countries
(streaming, web, etc.) and was hosted by Mashable, showed the new face of
social good. It is driven by social,
powered by mobile technology, and measured by engagement. Storytelling
was the essential ingredient in the engagement cycle. I don’t recall the word “charity” being used.
The focus is on “action to effect
change.”
The emphasis on girls’ (LetGirlsLead) and women’s causes was
paramount. The Gates Foundation is in
the thick of it. Melinda Gates stressed
the fact that, by 2015, 95% of the global population will have some access to
mobile. She stressed that enlightened
story-telling is the centerpiece of any fund-raising effort.
Even content got a makeover.
Every story, every article, every photograph on any platform can become
the source of a cause campaign. A good
example of this kind of platform is Ryot.org, a Millennial news site that ties
fundraising to very diverse content. The
underlying assumption—very Millennial—is that no piece of journalism is
complete without a cause to action. This
is all very immediate and spontaneous. An
article about anti- Obamacare ads is fit subject for a campaign to raise funds
for healthcare in Africa.
I was surprised at how extensive the adoption of sustainable
business practices have become by the large brands. Ikea seems to be leading the charge, enforcing
a Code of Conduct with the massive supply chain of 11,000. The company has invested $2 billion wind farms
and solar panels. Coca-Cola is also
deeply concerned about sustainability and with good reason. The company does business in 208 countries,
many facing water and other resource shortages.
It is one thing to hear Al Gore talk about the effects of climate change,
but entirely another when an executive from Coca-Cola speaks about climate
representing a real threat to their business and bottom line.
A central and compelling theme at the Summit was the growing
role of advertising and creative agencies in promoting social causes. This is a global collaboration as the World
Economic Forum, the Advertising Council, and Ketchum, the PR agency with a
presence in 70 countries, have joined the effort. Called
“Creatives for Good” and launched June 2013 at the Cannes Festival, it is
essentially a best practices platform of 60 campaigns from around the world on
social issues such as health, education and the environment.
To be sure, the Ad Council has a long history of PSA’s, such
as TV spots against drunk driving. But
this is different because Millennials look for an implicit connection social
causes and the commercial compact. As a
number of speakers suggested, brands want to be connected to a higher purpose
and unmet needs. Brands need a social
currency. So do advertising agencies.
Some of the winners of the cause campaigns at Cannes
include: Saatchi & Saatchi for “Days of Hope,” which addresses the
suffering of the homeless during winters in Europe (a homeless person gave the
TV weather report); Ogilvy for “waiting for Seven Years,” which featured a
dialysis patient telling his story in a crowded train station; Ketchum for “The
Tree Comments,” a commercial about the environment. When a chestnut falls from
the tree, it strikes a membrane that makes music and tells a tale.
On another front, the Leo Burnett Agency was involved in a
campaign: one billion, one day, one message, one word in answer to the
rhetorical question: The World Needs More? The responses flooded in: #change, justice,
peace, shelter, etc. in a variety of languages from the four-corners. This wasn’t the old Coke campaign warmed over.
The agency scraped the social
marketplace for key words. Brands paid
$1 a word for sponsorship. This is a
good example of brands and consumers joining together around a cause. It didn’t hurt that Beyoncé brought a little
juice to the proceedings.
The Summit made clear that the embrace of cause by major
brands signals a fundamental shift and has become part of their mission
statement. Gucci’s “Chimes for Change,”
powered by Catapult, a crowd-funding site, promotes education, health and
justice for every girl, every woman, everywhere.
Unilever is a good example of a company that not only
associates its brands (Dove, Lipton, Ben & Jerry’s, Persil and others) with
particular causes. Its corporate mission
statement embraces a Sustainable Living Plan (USLP). Unilever’s objectives include: 1. Help more than one billion people improve
their health and fitness. 2. Halve the
environmental footprint for Unilever products. 3. Source 100% of our agricultural materials
sustainably.
I’ll repeat myself: much of this conference was given over
to the empowerment of women. The agenda
and a legion of women speakers spoke to this.
Perhaps I have been attending too many male-dominated conferences
because what really surprised me at the Summit was the tone of the
meetings. I’m not talking about UN
courtesy and deference. The panels were
populated by successful women executives, some of them working for Dell and
other companies committed to women’s empowerment. Dell is committed to empowering one billion
women by 2020. I can’t recall the number
of times I heard speakers mention that we are witnessing a new Women’s
Movement, global in nature, connected by mobile, fed by social and supported by
some of the most prestigious brands. Again,
this was not UN speak. It was in the
air, in the ranks, and in the brands.
I’ll close with a note about mobile and health because it
was central to the Summit and has implications both at home and abroad. Johnson & Johnson is a big player in the
sector, focusing especially on maternal health.
In one example in the US, pregnant women are given three free text
messages a week to ask their doctors questions and schedule appointments. This has been a huge success. There are also people in the field explaining
the Affordable Care Act. Follow-up
research suggests women in the program feel more prepared to be mothers and are
much more diligent keeping doctor’s appointments. This program—text4baby—has received a lot of
attention and donations through Facebook and Twitter.
During the course of the conference a number of people said,
“This is not your father’s UN” and they certainly had a point. And neither was it your mother’s cause
marketing campaign.
The full conference agenda can be found at www.mashable.com.
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