1979 invigorated UK marketing. 2024 can again for the UK state.

The UK election is “the most important for a generation” as it heralds a new narrative about the delivery of public services. Marketing and advertising can play critical roles in “well-governed” state-owned enterprises and digital citizenship.

Three weeks ago, driving across the vast American Southwest, I learned of the UK election from a text from my wife. Although living in the U.S. for most of the last 30 years we retain our British nationality. I scribbled about how marketing and advertising cannot ignore the election: you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. I summarized proposals for what our institutions, brands and agencies can do.

I signed up to the timely Advertising. Who cares? initiative led by Brian Jacobs and Nick Manning . I care, yet had thought advertising to have succumbed to anomie, the lack of direction that occurs when there is a breakdown in the social bonds and institutions that hold individuals together. Anomie was conceived by Emile Durkheim , a French sociologist, and happens during times of rapid social change . Now is such a time of social transformation.

Marketing and advertising have been riven by technology, monopoly, and fraud over the last two decades. Not only has this caused devastating damage to society but, as I analyzed before, programmatic, digital, and performance advertising have shredded brand value . Big Tech extracted usurious rents while our institutions kowtowed to their money. Pundits and academics with no experience hawked columns, books, and mini-MBA’s without substance.

?The wide support Brian and Nick are receiving demonstrates that both experienced practitioners and younger talents in the industry seek a new direction. In marketing and advertising we are a microcosm of a nation that in 2024 as in 1979 seeks change. We can’t ignore that.

A highlight of the 1979 election was Saatchi’s advertising campaign Labour Isn't Working . In contributing to the election of Thatcher this told a greater lie, subversive to the health of society, that government does not work. Thatcher embarked on two decades of public service privatization. Reagan told Americans to fear the government he led. The Anglo-Saxon nations implemented neoliberal economics causing rising inequality and stagnating growth.

Marketing and advertising thrived in the 80’s and 90’s as inequality grew. My own career took off with clients privatized British Telecom and Royal Mail Parcels, and deregulated Lloyds Bank. I also won a brief, lucrative, and failed assignment to launch US private healthcare in Britain. (Every leading agency sought this account: in these times, we did not query social or environmental outcomes.)?

Midway through this 2024 campaign, the stakes in this, “the most important for a generation”, became even higher with the entry of the far right. In his Striking 13 blog (I hope everyone has read George Orwell) political analyst Ian Dunt writes: “This election is the most important for a generation … It's because this is where the battle against populism takes place. Keir Starmer's role is historic. The burden on him is immense. It is to neutralise the populist threat. Because if he fails, very terrible things indeed wait for us on the horizon.”?

Dunt wrote How Westminster works and why it doesn't , and understands the challenge of getting public services working for the people, a neglected aspect of Labour’s manifesto: “Five mission-specific boards covering the main commitments on growth, the NHS, clean energy, crime and skills…the basic weaponry in the war against populism does not lie with high rhetoric and low abuse. It lies in whether the engine room of government can function. Whether it can deliver. Whether people feel the system improves their lives.”

The challenge ahead will be to bring competence to a British state that could not build a single high speed rail line. Labour has read The Mission Economy by Mariana Mazzucato who says: “What is needed is both a New Deal in terms of mission-oriented investments but also a new deal in terms of a modern social compact - one that allows the state to socialize not only risks but also rewards. Maybe then innovation-led growth will also become growth that includes all of us.”

Labour will re-involve the state in the delivery of essential services like water, transport, and energy. The creeping privatization of health and social care is a particular flashpoint in the debate. Yet to a public now used to the digital transformation of swathes of the economy, in particular finance, retail, and communications, the bar for delivery of these services is higher than ever.

Marketing and advertising must bring knowledge, capabilities, and talent developed in the private sphere to the public. Other nations from Taiwan (mission, to accelerate industrial innovation, to create Smart Taiwan ) to Estonia (mission, to build the most advanced digital society in the world ) have developed digital citizenship services improving people’s lives.

The argument that digital citizenship can only work for small nations does not wash. In Britain (as it has been in China) the approach can be experimentation at the city or regional level, with winning solutions scaled nation-wide. Citizens by Jon Alexander, and Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakeley document work already in progress around the country.

Britain possesses the wealth, educational systems, and creative industries to build enterprises of scale that as Mazzucato writes: “Well-governed SOEs (State Owned Enterprises) can boost ?economic development and create technological spillovers, sectoral complementarities, and economies of scale and scope.”

Dunt’s podcast collaborator and author of a wonderful new book on Orwell, Dorian Lynskey , quotes from a 1975 book ‘The Death of Democracy’, “It is difficult to imagine a previous period when such an all-persuasive hopefulness was exhibited at all levels of British life.” ?

I did not find this when I arrived in London in 1975. A free education, and a lot of luck, led me to a career in which I found the insights, data, and effectiveness of marketing, and the problem-solving and creativity of advertising, rewarding, relevant, and compelling. I have never lost that feeling. The times today may be different, but brands and agencies can play an essential role beyond communication and contribute to the delivery of public as well as private services.

Stewart Pearson

Stewart believes in Consilience, the unity of knowledge across disciplines. A Scot, he has lived, worked, and traveled in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. He settled in the well-governed Evergreen State and Seattle. After studying Statistics and Marxist Economics he had four decades of experience in marketing and advertising focused on building client brands directly and globally.?He was Global Chief Client Officer and Vice-Chairman of Wunderman when it was the fastest-growing major agency in WPP. David Ogilvy once sent him a telex from India and Lester Wunderman told him stories of Picasso from the village in France where both men, Stewart’s heroes, had lived. Stewart is on LinkedIn and Twitter , and at [email protected] .