By Sérgio Brodsky
Futurists and brand strategists have more in common than one might think. Whilst the former focuses on projecting unimaginable scenarios across the most varied contexts, the latter focuses on communicating a business promise that is expected to be kept. Despite having different lines of work, both, projections and promises exist to design the future. And, the use of strategic narratives is what unites both practitioners. In the case of brand strategists, strategic narratives can be deployed to communicate the very essence of a brand via visual and verbal identities or articulate a moment in time via advertising campaigns.
That said, to ensure a desired future for the brand communications industry, it is time brand strategists take the leap and become more aware and practicing of Strategic Foresight and Futures Thinking approaches and methodologies, widening their perspective within our broader planetary context.
This is exactly what I did upon attending a course by Professor Sohail Inayatullah and Dr. Colin Russo, which allowed me to crystallize a future-oriented industry model that I coined Urban Brand-Utility (UBU). Below is a summary, that is further articulate on this article, showing the employment of the Causal Layered Analysis approach as an attempt to shifting brand communications’ modus operandi.
The context of brand communications used future
Brand communications has polluted cities, annoyed consumers and jeopardized its own existence. Beyond a mass-media cacophony, my industry have also contributed to a significant carbon footprint and runaway consumption leading towards severe environmental threats.
In the UK, for instance, advertising is responsible for two million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions annually, equivalent to heating 50% of London’s social housing, according to CarbonTrack. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why the advertising of sustainability can be so hard to execute and why advertising itself is being challenged by its own carbon dioxide emissions.
A research led by Diana Ivanova from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, revealed that only around 20 percent of emissions for which we are individually responsible come from direct usage, such as driving a car or having a shower. The rest is all hidden in the supply chains of what we buy. And between production and purchase lies promotion (powered by media advertising) the last frontier in terms of redesigning our economy’s supply-chain from linear to circular.
Paradoxically, even the promotion of climate action is as questionable as the promotion of anything else. For example, Milton Glaser, creator of the seminal “I♥NY” logo and one of the greatest graphic designers in the world, came up with a logo for climate change in 2014. In an awareness effort, Glaser’s logo got amplified through billboards (around New York City) and collectible buttons sold for US$5.
Despite its clear emotional appeal, the logo could not effectively be translated into action. In fact, its carbon footprint, alone, may have justified its abandonment.
The same applies to the more commercial advertising attempting at jumping on the sustainability brandwagon, such as Renault’s current campaign in Bucharest, Romania, encouraging people to buy it’s EV Zoe. A digital billboard connected to pollution sensors and powered by a custom-made algorithm was created to give price discounts corresponding to levels of pollution at any given time of day.
Undoubtedly a very clever execution that may even drive a sales lift and become a contender to the coveted Cannes Lions SDG award, but does it actually make Bucarest, Europe’s second most polluted city less polluted? No.
Present challenges, dragged from the past
From an industry perspective, the advertising business model was never so challenged. Beginning with the fact that most people dislike ads and don’t really care about brands, marketing budgets are being cut as a way to fund lower prices, new product developments or a better customer experience.
Furthermore, automation advancements fuelled by sophisticated machine learning algorithms supported by long-tail ecommerce platform may, in the middle-term future, challenge the need to communicate your brand.
Using an AI deep-learning algorithm developed at CERN to manage its stock, German retailer Otto has been able to predict what customers will order with 90% accuracy. Otto buys products from suppliers without human intervention by looking at 30 billion transactions and 200 variables (i.e. weather). This reduced 2 million stock returns and surplus stock by 20%.
Hence, if the act of shopping turns from proactive to reactive, meaning a deselection of what your ecommerce platform of choice decides you need, why would any stimuli be required when choice is no longer a part of the purchase equation?!
Lastly, commoditization of the entire marketing industry has lowered the barriers for new entrants as well as agencies’ and media owners’ bargain power. When everyone is trying to disrupt, no one really is. The fact that in 2014 IBM acquired 1000 design agencies and now management consultancy and advisory firms are on a crazy acquisition spree, despite the famous 50/50 M&A’s success rate, shows the brand communications function is moving from the centre to the periphery of bigger ecosystems.
As an industry, brand communications cannot afford to simply evolve; it must leapfrog its trajectory. Data has already given us enough insight. It’s time to embrace ambiguity and apply genuine strategic foresight to avoid posing for a notorious “Kodak moment”.
The unevenly distributed and deployed brand future
The urbanization mega-trend wholly underpins other forces shaping the way we live, now and in the future. Although cities only occupy 2% of the Earth’s landmass, they are where 75% of energy consumption and the majority of brand communications spend is concentrated.
As someone working in the marketing, media and advertising space, this is an important insight. If value is created from a need or desire, why aren’t our civic interactions populating journey maps aimed at optimizing the customer experience as well as the citizen experience?
For example, Indian energy company Halonix communicated its brand through LED billboards that lit up at night making streets safer. This campaign supplemented Delhi’s energy grid, the need to bolster its police force and is helping remove the city’s stigma as India’s rape capital.
Following explicit requests from the Indian population, the campaign is rolling out nationally. This shows that, markets, choice, and competition are not just a consumer’s best friend, but their political representation. Furthermore, by creating new meaning in an unprecedented way, Halonix achieved the feat of decommoditising energy and created the conditions to exiting a price war.
UBU is about using brands’ touch points as more than mere messengers to supplementing public utility services of all categories. Such logic can turn brand communications into a regenerative force for cities, where the promotion of goods and services is not only more profitable, but also environmentally enriching and socially virtuous.
Considering that 80% of urban diseases are a result of air pollution and the fact that climate change will be one of the biggest costs for business and society in the coming years, it becomes a matter of demonstrating how the private sector can creatively fix what big government has been failing to address.
In 2014, following a construction boom in Peru, Lima’s University of Technology (UTEC) deployed air-purifying billboards, each claiming to be as effective as 1200 trees and occupying a much smaller area. In Manila, Coca-Cola created a billboard made up of 3600 Fukien tea plants, which combined removed almost nearly 23,000 kilograms (50,000 pounds) of carbon dioxide in a year.
At the University of Sheffield in the UK, a billboard coated with microscopic particles of titanium dioxide can now eradicate the equivalent to the pollution created by about 20 cars every day. It costs £100 (AU$180.75) to coat a standard billboard with the benefit of turning advertisements into catalysts in more ways than one.
‘In Praise of Air’ Simon Armitage. Installation. from DED on Vimeo.
The rise of the citizen-consumer
People are interested in their well-being and the factors enabling or blocking it, which could take many forms. In Moscow, Sberbank was approached by major Russian real estate developers to collaborate on better infrastructure planning in residential areas. People’s opinions on local needs fueled targeted campaigns, promoting loans for small businesses. The ‘Neighbourhoods’ campaign generated nine times as many small business responses than traditional loan advertising.
In other words, people had their needs addressed with neighborhoods becoming more attractive. The city increases tax collection from the new businesses being set up, which also reduces the cost related from having to deal with derelict areas. As the biggest Russian bank, caring about citizens is not just a nice thing to do but an effective way for Sberbank to positively impact its bottom line.
Much more is required to create a reliable network of creative, urban resiliency. But according to the 2015 World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities: “Cities will always need large infrastructure projects, but sometimes small-scale infrastructure can also have a big impact on an urban area”.
Consumers may not hold the answers for everything, but that does not mean they should be treated as merely individual shoppers in the market. Citizen-consumers are important players in enabling business to tackle the issues that matter most. As important as it is to reduce the number of clicks on a consumer journey, reducing violence in the streets, pollution, unemployment, or enhancing opportunities for entertainment, human connections and so much more is what people are interested in.
However, the above (and several other similar campaigns that preceded and followed) were all stunts, great for consumers’ awareness and advertising award entries but short-sighted in terms of embracing a bigger commercial opportunity while addressing society’s most pressing issues.
Projecting a new model underpinned by creative urban resilience
Domino’s Pizza looked beyond the traditional path-to-purchase to permeate people’s life-journeys. Aware that potholes, cracks, and bumps in the road can cause irreversible damage to people’s pizzas during the drive home, Domino’s decided to pave towns across the USA to save their customers’ pizzas from the bad roads. Obviously, not only Domino’s customers are benefited from this effort, but every single driver going through the few selected roads.
This may sound silly but according to the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission of the U.S. Congress, the annual investment required by all levels of government to simply maintain the nation’s highways, roads, and bridges is now estimated to be $185 billion per year for the next 50 years. Today, the nation annually invests about $68 billion.
Mayors and city managers from the municipalities where “paving for pizza” has taken place have acknowledged the creation of shared value. In this sense, a new breed of Mayors with a Marking mind, or, as I like calling them…CMayors (CMO + Mayor), are equally empowered to driving the Urban Brand-Utility vision.
According to Bill Scherer, Mayor of Bartonville, TX: “This unique, innovative partnership allowed the Town of Bartonville to accomplish more potholes repairs.” For the city manager of Milford, DE, Eric Norenberg: “We appreciated the extra Paving for Pizza funds to stretch our street repair budget as we addressed more potholes than usual.”
The UBU conceptual framework flips the current advertising model by enhancing, instead of interrupting, moments of brand interaction with relevant experiences.
This can be done by following six strategic imperatives:
- Translate the big idea that defines your brand into a big utility that can operationalize its impact.
- Replace interruptive interactions with enhancing ones by delivering a public utility service.
- Turn any existing utility of a communications effort from a stunt into a sustained practice.
- Shift your business focus from short-term sales results to longer-term profitability.
- Broaden your audiences from customers to citizens, expanding paths-to-purchase onto life journeys.
- Diversify revenue from sales to the creation of shared value.
Creating shared value in distributive and circular ways
But there’s also a bigger commercial model to be explored. First, by definition, UBU programs have three core objectives:
- Enabling savings or new earnings for cities
- Creating urban shared value to the cities’ inhabitants, and
- Delivering superior return on media investment (ROMI).
Here’s a hypothetical situation. Let’s assume that Domino’s Paving for Pizza program is taken to its full potential, generating a large surplus to the city of Bartonville by minimizing the costs from dealing with potholes. Rather than treating this as a one-off campaign, smart mayors would try and create a virtuous cycle, where 50% of the surplus is retained by the city, 25% is returned to the advertiser and 25% to the agency and media owner – a value only unlocked by repeating the approach.
The more advertisers communicate their messages in a way that benefits brand, people and city, the cheaper it becomes to do more of it. And, the more cities encourage such an approach the faster societal problems would be addressed, as shown on the model below.
As with the idea of a circular economy where products and services go beyond an end user’s finite life-cycle, UBU looks at brand communications as closed loops by designing a system bigger than fixed campaign periods, target audiences and business-as-usual KPIs. This way, marketing budgets are effectively turned into investment funds with returns in the form of brand cut-through, happier customers, social impact and more effective city management.
Reinventing the Agora for direct, regenerative participation in the 21st century
The operationalization of UBU would then be a matter of matching of brands that align with specific urban challenges. This way, instead of top-down public-private contracts, issues are identified by local constituents informing future UBU programs, as wanted by the people and enabled by advertising media.
For instance, a digital platform playing the role of Agora, the central square as well as center of civic debates and decisions would also allow every dollar to effectively count as a vote. Firstly, with passive data inputs from social media commentary, reputable publications. Secondly, by encouraging citizens to proactively voice their views of change at specific locations and points in time the idea of citizen journalism could be taken to the mainstream and augment our notions of democracy.
Media and advertising have powered a linear economy that is now facing severe challenges. Conversely, urbanization has fueled population growth that went from a sign of prosperity to one of alarm. The strategic opportunity is to bend the line and turn the existing real estate and brand communication infrastructure into a network of creative urban resilience that benefits all parties involved and educates everyone in the value-chain.
After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “What is the city but the people?”
As a comparison, Magna Global estimated that in 2018 global media spending in brand communications will reach US$ 551 billion but, according to the Pike Institute, by 2020 investment in Smart City infrastructure will not surpass US$108 billion; an approximate 5:1 ratio respectively.
Through the UBU approach the current US$ 551 billion could merge into the much larger pie of Global Welfare & Security spend of US$ 40.5 trillion, a figure obtained by dividing Gross World Product (GWP) by the 30% global average spent on welfare and security as per the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The above, at least in theory, would be plausible as advertisers would then become key players in public-private-partnerships.
Media and advertising have powered a linear economy that is now facing severe challenges. Conversely, urbanization has fueled population growth that went from a sign of prosperity to one of alarm. The strategic opportunity is to bend the line and turn the existing real estate and brand communication infrastructure into a network of creative urban resilience that benefits all parties involved and educates everyone in the value-chain.
After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “What is the city but the people?”
About the Author:
Sérgio Brodsky (L.LM, MBA) is Founder and Principal of strategy consultancy SURGE, Marketing lecturer at RMIT, Columnist and Editorial Board Advisor at Marketing Magazine, Columnist at The Fifth Estate, Chairman of the prestigious The Marketing Academy, alumni, and recipient of multiple awards and honours in the marketing, media and advertising industry. He can be followed on twitter @brandKzar and www.sergio-brodsky.com
