For the lion’s share of my professional career I have centred my skills on helping brands live-engage with their audience and build meaningful and lasting connections with people. But now, I have a new direction.
Over the past 20+ years I have worked at a number of Canada’s largest ad agencies and been the owner & co-owner of two independent experiential marketing agencies. Focusing in the areas of experiential, activation and sponsorship marketing, I found the experience quite rewarding in that I was able to craft and witness first-hand the magic of interweaving a brand into people’s daily lives. I had the opportunity to work with some of the most respected brands in the world, using the craft of experience to engage people, influence behaviour and build enduring brand affinity. While I would not trade away this period in my life, it is now my time to chart a new course.
My move to create and launch Shift_better was founded on a number of realizations and events that happened around the same time. But among the most impactful was the stark, sinking-in cognizance that our planet and people are in peril. There is little debate that the trajectory we are on is untenable, and in very simple terms, people need to get along better and we need to make our home more livable. Failing to take meaningful action will undoubtedly have consequences for generations.
Sustainability and inclusion are solutions for a viable path forward. We need to foster innovation to create and generate demand for new products and services that demand significantly less of our natural resources. We need a broader, collective understanding and acceptance of the differences of people and we need to build economically robust communities that can support jobs and our health. It has become more apparent than ever that our business ecosystems need to expand beyond the sole purpose of generating shareholder value.
We found that more organizations were interested in creating deeper connection with their audiences.
The second contributing factor came into focus as our experiential agency, Hydraulic, began to emerge from the pandemic, a period in which live engagement via brand activation and events ceased to exist. As we started to re-engage with clients, we observed a few notable shifts in interest.
We continue to find ourselves talking to more non-profit organizations, causes, foundations and the like, that want to put significantly more focus on building their brands by engaging their audiences in meaningful experiences. Repeatedly we are hearing a similar story that as an organization they had made great strides in effectively deploying digital technology to engage their audiences and that it was the best tool they had. But so had everyone else. A common theme of discussion was that depth of engagement and affinity had been jeopardized and that going forward they wanted to engender deeper and more meaningful connections. In other words they wanted to focus on their long game and build their brands by taking a page or two from the experiential playbook of some of the most successful experience-driven brands that exist today.
Another trend we observed was that traditional for-profit brands were putting more emphasis on their full business eco-systems and they wanted to use their marketing channels to percolate messaging of their bona fide endeavours. Corporate and Social Responsibility and the rapid emergence of ESG have risen to higher prominence in many organizations as they too better understand the fragile interdependency of profit, people and planet. We find ourselves increasingly hearing the words inclusion, sustainable, community, wellness and purpose. And as creators of experiences that bring together brands and people, the question we heard more and more often is how can we create experiences that send this message? How do we share the positive vision for our company through brand experience?
I realized that I was no longer immune from responsibility.
My third motivation for launching Shift_better is perhaps the most challenging to reconcile. In doing so I am in part disparaging the foundation of my livelihood over the past 20 years and that of many of my industry colleagues and friends. For this I apologize, as no malice is designed or intended.
I have long understood that as a communicator who constructs experiences to deliver messaging that influences behaviour, I play a role in generating demand, and for the most part, I believed I was immune from any significant responsibility related to the product or service I was promoting. It is arguable that because I didn’t make the product, or because I didn’t necessarily buy it, that I was a mostly non-accountable middleman in the massive cog of global production. And speaking with many of my industry colleagues across digital, print, broadcast etc. they too felt the same way. If the phone rang to promote a new mousetrap, we would take the call as who were we, as communicators, to decide if the product is worthy of building demand.
But to this end a sobering insight came into view: the marketing and advertising industry believes it has a form of diplomatic immunity from the consequences of the product and service demand they are generating. It is this very issue that I have wrestled with for some time as I also clearly understand our intricate balance of both macro and mirco economics very much depends on the demand we generate for the products and services we have today.
As a communicator, this quandary was profound. I grappled with the role I could play whereby I did not bite the hand that feeds me but at the same time use my skills and expertise to help combat some our most pressing issues.
My reconciliation and genesis for an agency with a purpose came in one word: better. For the next chapter of my professional career, I want to focus my expertise, skill and energy on a goal of Every Day Impact - the belief that wide proliferation and adoption of better choices by many can ultimately have transformational positive impact for people and our planet.
From this Shift_better was born and our frontier is working with organizations that drive social good: social enterprises that have a purpose baked into their mission, causes and foundations that pursue social impact initiatives and progressive brands that understand and embrace the social and environmental ecosystems of their businesses.
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