Do ads really contribute to social good?
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“Over the past decade or so, social good has emerged as an underlying theme for many award-winning works at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the world’s premier advertising festival. The question remains, however, whether ads actually contribute to the social good, and whether creators of ads can have a positive impact on society.” – Susumu Namikawa, operating officer @ Dentsu
Susumu Namikawa’s A Better Future series explores:?
Curious to find out more? Here are a few excerpts from the series…
PART 1 | Socially Conscious Advertising
Looking back, one might say that socially conscious advertising took root in the 1970s.
In Japan, we regard advertising as a means of disseminating information to society. Its original purpose was to convince people to buy things but it can also convey value at the psychological and emotional levels. It is such messages that connect brands and consumers.
That tradition of delivering messages to society through advertising continues even now and is the industry’s standard approach. In fact, although there is a marketing need to carry out campaigns featuring socially conscious messages, due to the commoditization of a product’s value, ad creators are motivated to also make advertisements that connect with society. But what is it that drives them? I believe that there are two main motivators:
In Japanese, the word advertising is written using Kanji characters that mean “widely inform.” However, members of Japan’s advertising industry had started questioning whether their mission was only to inform consumers. They saw cause-related marketing as offering the possibility of both boosting product sales for clients and benefiting society.?
The shift to cause-related marketing in Japan rose to another level following the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami that struck the country’s northeast Tohoku region on March 11, 2011.
The disaster had a huge impact on how Japanese companies viewed their place and role in society. [...] Money no longer served as a means of exchange in the region’s economy. Volunteers, whether acting as individuals or on behalf of companies or non-profit organizations, all pooled their resources.
Locally, supermarkets allowed spaces to be used for emergency shelters, while bicycle manufacturers provided people with bicycles on which to move around. Musicians played songs in the shelters and volunteers distributed food.?
Until that time, Japan’s corporate and non-profit sectors had been rigidly separate, but now people from both sectors were working hand in hand. Through that process, many companies came to realize that they had resources that could help solve challenges confronting communities.
Can data-driven marketing help us make a better society? Or will advances in digitalization and data someday lead to a society under the control of such information, as commonly portrayed in science fiction dystopias? For example, the 1982 movie Blade Runner depicts artificially intelligent androids in a deeply unequal society dominated, from the top down, by data.
Scenes of the cityscape appear like a collage with images of Tokyo and huge holographic advertisements displayed on the sides of buildings. Some scenes even show Tokyo-style standing noodle bars. But people don’t think that Tokyo is like the city in the film, do they?
领英推荐
A 1970 edition of the Whole Earth Catalog magazine (last issued in 1998), regarded as a Bible by many hippies on the US West Coast, contained the slogan, “Access to tools.” It expressed a desire to put the world back into the hands of the people, at a time when practically everything was being mass-produced.
The internet originated from this broader movement, and now huge digital platform operators and major countries are rushing to deploy the internet to maximize the happiness of people worldwide.
The message of ‘power to the people’ that accompanied the internet’s beginnings, however, still resonates around the world.?
People generally regard data and creativity as opposites. Efficiency is contrasted with human qualities. We debate about whether society should be convenient or caring. In other words, people tend to understand the world by creating simplistic dichotomies and then arguing with each other about which side is more important.
I believe this tendency has been growing stronger in recent years. Indeed, people who hope for advances in data applications and digitalization and those who distrust such applications and the shift to digitalize have come to a standoff, which itself has become an issue in society today.
Essentially, such debates and arguments are rooted in dichotomous thinking. Instead of choosing between two sides, however, it should be possible to combine both sides into something more, just like the approach of advanced chess.
‘Customer experience’ is a term we commonly use in the advertising industry. Originally, it referred to customer service as well as support provided to customers by customer service centers. In more recent years, however, the term has been applied more broadly, and now refers to all kinds of consumer responses at every stage of consumption.
Customer experience is a very broad and complicated field. If defined broadly, to include all kinds of consumer experiences, it involves many disciplines, including advertising, product development, service development, data-driven marketing, direct marketing, and system consulting.
That means customer experiences are created through the combined talents and skills of a very wide range of professionals, including ad creators, consultants, product designers, service designers, data analysts, and, of course, marketers. For these reasons, I believe that solutions to many complex issues that remain unsolved today can be found by conscientiously mapping new journeys for diverse individuals and things.
The desire to make our communities better places and bring happiness to other people comes from love which, in essence, is unconditional. It does not need to be reciprocated. Indeed, experiencing this can be a source of personal growth.
People cannot move past their individual limitations by thinking only of themselves. By thinking profoundly about others, a person can grow beyond themselves. This does not apply only to individuals; it is also true for companies.
Businesses need to think deeply about the communities that make up society, and explore ways to help people who are struggling in those communities. It is only then that a company can begin to break through the narrow confines of its internal logic, go beyond its existing potential, and really grow.
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