What follows is a brief retelling of how a noble mission was born for advertising agencies and brands the world over. Established to support retention of biodiversity and species across our planet.
On (around) the 27th September 2018 a United Nations backed fund for conservation projects was established and now a year on that fund has already contributed millions of dollars to benefit animals and their habits. In fact it’s not a two or three year Corporate Social Responsibility initiative it’s actually changing the way brands and agencies approach marketing forever. The fund is aiming for 100 million dollars a year in perpetuity. Are you or the brand/agency you represent in a position to sign up and support this noble mission?
On the 19th September 2019, I attended a roundup of this year’s Cannes Lions Grand Prix Creative Advertising Awards winners as shared to a Sydney based audience comprising agency and brand executives across digital and marketing remits. A panel were present and on the panel was a freelance film director for a company named: Finch. Christopher Nelius is his name and his was the story that I walked away wanting to share with all who I encountered. It’s a story of the power of one man who had an idea and how he compelled others to care enough to build with agile force a fund worth supporting. Read more for details:
“I’d be working on this documentary about conservationists and I’d come back to Australia and I was watching the cricket and drinking beer and this commercial kept coming up with this beautiful family of cheetahs that were really well rendered and CGI’d and stuff. They made you feel so good and they were selling phone data and like, wtf do cheetahs have to do with selling phone data?
I’ll tell you what they have to do with it, they sell it. These animals have created a feeling and a good feeling in me, and I’m like yeah: Optus!
Having just flown around the world and met all these conservationists, and encountered the massive problem of extinction and destruction of biodiversity on our planet, floating around in my head, I realised at that point that the advertising industry has been getting away with something — and I don’t mean for that to sound accusatory. But brands and advertising have been using the imagery of animals to sell products and come through with millions in profits but in the real world those animals are in a lot of trouble.
And if we paid 2 Chainz to be in an Expensify ad, god knows how much money that guy made, and so he should, don’t get me wrong. That’s what brands do they pay for music to be in their ads but nothing goes back to the wild animals. There was a french survey done a couple of years ago and 9 out of the 10 most popularly used in advertising are either on endangered lists or threatened lists.
So there’s a wrong there that needs to be righted. The idea there, isn’t to be so much let’s make a law and force brands to do these things actually in the current climate where people actually want to change the world — what if brands gave back just a tiny bit only when an animal appears in an ad?
You might have one campaign where Toyota does a campaign with an animal in it, the next campaign doesn’t have it, it’s only that campaign with the animal in it that a tiny bit of money gets put across. And, what if that became a global initiative where everybody signs up? Once you get a thousand brands or a hundred brands signed up we’re in the realm of raising 100 million dollars a year, and it’s not a lot of money for each individual brand, but once you pool it together the advertising brands in the private sector is helping to save the planet.
I had that idea maybe two years ago and I took it Rob Galluzzo (Founder and Managing Director of Finch) and he to his credit jumped on it. We had an opportunity to pitch it to Mars. Rob went and pitched that with Nick Garrett(who was the CEO of Clemenger BBDO) and pitched it to the Global CMO of Mars and he jumped on. And we can talk about our perspective on CMOs if you like and so Andrew Clarke (who was the global CMO of Mars) said: “I get these ideas all the time but this is the one — Mars are in if you can get the UN.”
And we’re like: The UN? We’ll just go knock on their door, send them an email or something (crowd in laughter.) To his credit Rob Galluzzo is one pushy guy and he found that eventually there was two degrees of separation for someone at the UN who was an outreach person — and he got the pitch in front of them and they said: “ yeah we’ll hear your pitch but it has to be in the next two week.” And enough people there liked it so now we’ve partnered with them, and I guess we weren’t really aiming for the UN at the time but in hindsight we wouldn’t be where we are without them and we wouldn’t be where we are without a lot of our partners including Mars and Sedated. But the coming together of the Lion’s Share was actually super fast. It caused us all ulcers and stress — and all the things that we were talking about earlier where all the hard work that goes into winning a Grand Prix.
This is really different to the other things that we’ve seen today, the purpose of it is, different. But it is entirely about the industry that we’re all in. It’s about righting a wrong. And maybe five years ago this wouldn’t have gotten off the ground but I think brands definitely understand that if they can be seen to be doing good then the value return on that is way beyond what it’s going to cost them: zero point five percent of their media spend.
Ultimately once the consumers really hear about the Lion’s Share and it becomes a thing almost like not using child labour and it becomes an industry standard thing, consumers will get behind it I really hope that lots of brands get on to it.
To be honest with you we’re only a year old as of next Tuesday. We have fantastic partners and fantastic brands that are coming on board and we have a few more that we can’t mention who are about to sign. But we need more.
And all it is is just saying ‘yes’ this is the right thing to do. Even if your brand doesn’t use animals in brands ever it’s actually about just saying: “yeah we think this is the right thing to do and creating that coalition of the willing.” And we’re all about naming and faming the brands who sign up. We want to shout that brand’s name from the mountain top and say yep: “we got behind this thing that is going to help, just nudge the needle a little bit to help save biodiversity for the planet.” ”
This was a direct transcript from the session — B&T Breakfast Club: Cannes Lions Download — presented by Snapchat.
Photo is credited: Christin Noelle via Unsplash.
