Cannes 1, Ambition Zero
What strikes most is what was not being said at the Cannes Advertising Festival
Right now, trillions of dollars are flowing into the great transition to the post-carbon world. From energy to food to real estate to finance there’s a huge shift underway. The new world is being born all around us, but it seems to have passed by the folks at Cannes this year.
Ironic, because you’d think marketers would be pretty good at spotting fast-growing trends. Last year the Net Zero economy grew at 9% while at the same time the traditional economy barely scraped 0.1%.
It’s not that people aren’t talking about Sustainability at the festival that brings advertisers, platforms and agencies together, it’s peppered here and there across stages, rooftops and roundtables. But there are only two conversations.?
The most common one is led by the hard-working ad industry activists e.g. Clean Creatives's Duncan Meisel and Purpose Disruptors' Jonathan Wise who are successfully dissuading top talent from working on fossil fuel accounts. But even when times are good, there’s always an agency prepared to stoop lower to get the cash in.?
I respect climate activists because of the genuine bravery involved. Brave work? When was the last time you got arrested for pushing back on a tagline? Still, hassling a copywriter is a bit like screaming at the petrol pump attendant when the cigar-chomping oil barons are the ones pulling the strings.
The other conversation was that we need to account for carbon emissions in the media supply chain, from production, to distribution and viewing. Not wrong. This year’s announcement by GARM and Ad Net Zero was a big step forward in establishing common standards for pinpointing the emissions associated with the production, distribution and consumption of media.?
It's a heavy lift and Sebastian Munden and a crack team of network leaders have done a great job. But even a totally carbon-free media plan won't add up to much if you’re selling high-intensity carbon nature-damaging products through it.?
The Conversation No One Is Having
The conversation no one is having, is the much more fundamentally ambitious one of deploying human creativity as our best defence against the climate shitshow. A shitshow that’s already hitting and about to get a whole lot uglier.
And I don’t mean ‘creativity’ in the sense of popping a crushed Coke can on a billboard (bravo everyone, now back to the plastic). I’m talking industrial scale Human ingenuity, building radically creative solutions to the biggest problems.?
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I’m talking industrial scale Human ingenuity, building radically creative solutions to the biggest problems.?
Next year, what does good look like? It looks like actual, scalable solutions that decarbonise, save money, make profit and have a social impact all at the same time.
Don’t think that’s doable? Check out Mark Bjornsgaard 's Deep Green the groundbreaking venture situating data centres in public pools: Free heat for the community, free cooling for the servers, no energy wasted. That’s what Humanity’s Grand Prix looks like. Where's the 'captured carbon' Lion for that??
Meanwhile 10,000 people plying the Croissette, opining on their latest AI hack and not one of them talking about The Brief of The Century. I thought commercial creativity was all about reimagining businesses for the future?
Not one of them talking about The Brief of The Century
The real reason the ad community isn’t taking this brief on is that they’re suffering from what psychologists call ‘Learned Helplessness’. They can’t imagine how they can both be the drivers of overconsumption and repurpose those marketing skills to more useful ends.
Demand Switching
But if advertisers can shape buying behaviour, they can reshape it too.
We spend a lot of our time helping clients understand that Demand Switching is how marketing shows up in the 21st century. It’s a framework that switches demand away from polluters and towards clean, green products, brands and business models. It’s how to create viable businesses that are resilient to climate disruption and will reshape categories in our Net Zero world.
What I am calling for is a more robust and ambitious approach, using business as an activist tool.
The truly inspiring creative vision we’re all looking for is the one that defines what a thriving 21st century regenerative business looks like. See you next year??
Leo Rayman is CEO & Founder of EdenLab, the sustainability innovation firm switching demand to cleaner, greener products, brands and businesses.
Keep growing. But never grow up. It’s a trick.
9 个月We need Cannes and other industry bodies representing (often unintentionally) ‘belwethers’ on climate momentum, to understand their role in breeding confidence not just within the industry they represent but critically amongst policy makers, to tilt the market dynamics advertisers play within in favour of more sustainable biz models. Nigel Topping calls this an ambition loop. Your analysis is on the money. The ad industry has retreated, burnt from overstepping after falling head over heels for the purpose Elixir. This is what modern, system sensitive leadership would recognise and look to course correct
Founder/Chief Strategist at OPEN Brand Consulting. Freelance strategy consultant. ex Leo Burnett, AKQA LDN, BBH NY. Helping brands open new futures.
9 个月Incredibly well said.
Helping regenerative and sustainable organisations with engaging digital media
9 个月Leo Rayman having spent the last few weeks unsubscribing from navel gazing newsletters, I’m pleased to report that yours gave me pure joy. Thank you for such an obvious yet elusive message. We can and have to do better for our planet and future generations. As recovering event and content marketing creatives hyper-mouse Ltd have changed our business to focus on the reaching the most important hearts and minds, our kids, with a single message: the only thing of any value is nature - and we are nature.
Global Marketing Executive | CMO
9 个月Paula Trabulsi
Storyteller for Climate Tech /// Founder at Space Jackets
9 个月Thank you for this text Leo Rayman I've never been to Cannes, but I assume that it's a festival of big agencies that have huge overhead and often depend (or think they depend) on their fossil fuels clients to survive. A lot of this year winners (or their parent companies) are also on the Clean Creatives list of firms working with fossil fuels industry. Many of them are publicly traded too. I don't expect quick change from them, because they are in a freeze response afraid they'll cease to exist. But I'm hopeful about individual creatives that are already leaving big agencies, joining communities and forming collectives and work together to bring change. Let the old way die if it can't figure how to transform itself in time. P.S. I'd love to see someone organising an alternative festival to Cannes, a festival of people devoting their creativity for good, for real ??