'Doing Good' at #MSHuddle

What does it mean to do good? The Google Define definition (because who uses the OED these days) believes that to do ‘good’ is to do something of benefit or advantage to someone. Helping people. It also means to be morally ‘good’ (let’s leave the righteousness angle for now). As an adjective, being good means to be desired of, to be approved by people, and to be of a high standard.

Doing something beneficial, that’s morally decent, that’s of a high standard and approved by people. 

By that measure, who wouldn't want to do good?

But ask yourself how much good do you do every day? This isn’t meant to be a depressing, existential question, but more of a realisation that we can do more good. I work in the advertising and media industry, and I know that it can be easy to be sucked into the factory line of ‘doing’, rather than ‘doing good’. It’s easy to do. We have pressures from clients, from our agency, from each other - doing good by those people usually becomes the primary focus - it’s easy to forget the people that matter. The people that we’re all in service to - people.

It’s easy to say, but incredibly hard to do. How do we use advertising and media as a means of doing good for people. It doesn’t just mean being socially responsible, or working with charity partners to do good, it means “doing something beneficial, that’s morally decent, that’s of a high standard and approved by people”. We all have the opportunity to do that, every day. 

How?

Well, tomorrow (Thursday the 17th November) we’ll be exploring that very thought with our whole agency team, all of our clients, and most of our partners (1,800 in total, I believe). Tomorrow, at Mindshare, we’re holding Huddle. 

Huddle is our annual gathering of brilliant minds, where we dedicate a whole day to discussing a big topic. Since it began in the UK five years ago, Huddle has now become a global event, and each year different offices attract more than 10,000 attendees to discuss a topic. This years topic is ‘doing good’. 

There will be more than 180 sessions (both on and 'off' Huddle - a bit like a media geeks off-Sonar), including everyone from Pixar and the BBC, through to the Wall Street Journal and AppNexus. All talking about what they think doing good means, and helping us to figure out how we can do more good, and be more good. That's awful English, but you know what I mean.

It’s also an amazing excuse to not use Powerpoint for a whole day (we don’t allow people to present from decks - which helps avoid any awkward selling-instead-of-doing-good moments).

It’s always a brilliant day and sparks off more ideas, projects, and movements than we can list. If you’re not coming along, then you can watch sessions live on Facebook, and everything will be archived here too.

#MSHuddle #AgencyVoices