Hope is an axe
Four months on and the past truly feels like another country. We’re looking back on our former lives and are it seems, barely able to recognise ourselves. Writing for The Correspondent, Nesrine Malik (read everything she writes) looks back:
Little things hit me. Small memories of the tissue that connected the different bits of my life – the grabbed coffees with friends, the quick meals consumed standing up while being bumped into by passers-by at street markets, ice creams eaten sitting at a bus stop, the satisfaction of getting on a train and bagging the last empty seat before it fills with commuters. All the bits in-between that when I look back on life before lockdown, constituted what living was.
And we’re grieving. In the words of David Kessler, the world’s foremost expert on grief:
We feel the world has changed, and it has… The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air…. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.
But to all those who want to go back to normal, or a slightly new, slightly adjusted version of the old normal, it’s worth remembering that for millions of people, pre-Covid ‘normal’ was pretty shit:
Britain’s households now owe an average of £15,385 to credit card firms, banks and other lenders (Source: Trade Union Congress).
Unionisation rates have fallen by 30 percentage points - with the result that wage growth in the UK has been lowered by around 0.75 percentage points per year over the past 30 years. (Source: Andrew Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England)
66% of zero-hours workers in the UK would rather have a contract with guaranteed hours (Source: Trade Union Congress).
Had US real wages tracked productivity since 1970, the median worker today would be 40% better off. Had UK wages tracked productivity since 1990, the median worker today would be 20% better off (Source: Bank of England).
Between April 2010 and April 2018, the median pre-tax weekly earnings of an employee in the UK fell by around 3% in real terms (Source: Office for National Statistics).
Only half of 30 year olds in the US make as much as their parents did at the same age (Source: Bureau of Economic Research).
In 1989 the richest 10 per cent in the US held 60 per cent of total household wealth. By 2018 they held 70 per cent of total household wealth (Source: Federal Reserve).
Between 1989 and 2018, the poorest 50% of Americans saw their share of total wealth go from down to from 4 per cent to 1% (Source: Federal Reserve).
In October 2016, the bottom 60% of Americans own 3% ($2.55 trillion) of the nation’s wealth The Forbes 400 own $2.4 trillion (Source:Credit Suissse/Forbes).
In 1998, on average the highest earners in the UK were paid 47 times that of the lowest. By 2015, the equivalent gap was 128 times more (Source: Social Mobility Commission).
An estimated 8.4 million people in England are living in an unaffordable, insecure or unsuitable home, according to the National Housing Federation (Source: Housing Association).
As much as one-third of the US workforce could be out of a job by 2030 thanks to automation (Source: McKinsey).
If progress continues at the current rate, it will take 15 years before all children are school ready by the age of five and more than 40 years before the attainment gap between poor 5 years-olds and their better-off peers is closed (Source: Social Mobility Commission).
If progress continues at the current rate, it will take 120 years before disadvantaged young people become as likely as their better-off peers to achieve A levels or equivalent qualifications (Source: Social Mobility Commission)
In 2018, student debt in the U.S. hit $1.5 trillion (Source: Federal Reserve).
Air pollution was the cause of 7 million premature deaths in 2014 (Source: World Health Organization).
Between 2017 and 2018, the suicide rate among 20- to 24-year-old males in the UK increased 31 per cent (Source: Office of National Statistics).
In the US, the rate of individuals reporting symptoms consistent with major depression over the past year increased 52 percent in teens and 63 percent in young adults over a decade (Source: American Psychological Association).
Life expectancy in the US dropped 0.1 % between 2016 and 2017 (Source: Centers for Disease Control).
In 2018, 62% of Americans reported that the current political climate is a significant stressor, and 69% reported that the nation’s future causes them stress (Source: American Psychological Association).
In the US, inadequate sleep (7hrs hours or less) increased from 30.9% in 2010 to 35.6% in 2018 (Source: American Psychological Association).
Antidepressant use in the US increased from 7.7% in 1999–2002 to 12.7% in 2011–2014 (Source: Centers for Disease Control).
More than 50% of Americans say the news causes them stress (Source: American Psychological Association).
59% of Americans say they could have used more emotional support than they received in the past year - the highest since 2014 (Source: American Psychological Association).
85% of Britons are now concerned about climate change, with the majority (52%) very concerned – the highest levels recorded since 2005 (Source: Ipsos MORI)
People who have experienced extreme weather e.g. floods are 50% more likely to suffer from problems including depression (Source: UK Environment Agency).
The number of hate crimes reported to police has more than doubled since 2013 (Source: Home Office).
Between 1995 and 2020, the proportion of people who are “dissatisfied with democracy” has risen by around +10% points, from 47.9 to 57.5% (Source: Center for the Future of Democracy, Global Satisfaction with Democracy, 2020).
47% of the British public feel they have no influence at all over national decision-making (Source: Hansard).
Sixty years ago the Labour party had more than 1 million members and the Conservative party around 2.5 million. Today more people have chosen to join the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds than all the political parties put together (Source: Robert Hazel & James Melton).
Et cetera.
There’s nothing like a global pandemic and ensuing global depression (sprinkled with the rule of death cult kleptocracy and the ascent of incompetence and absolute moral degeneracy to the highest offices in the land) to reveal the fault lines in society and the true state of things.
Of course “What the pandemic has exposed” is fast getting to be a tired journalistic trope. But we cannot afford to become anaesthetized to what has been revealed. The fault-lines between rich and poor, white and black, professional class and ‘essential workers’ (pretty much everybody else), young and old, frail and strong, elite and forgotten, between those with choices and those with no choice, between the tellers of truth and the peddlers of lies, the exploiters and the exploited…all lie now like open wounds in our society.
Marx and Engels were a hundred and seventy two years ahead of events: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Perhaps then it should be no surprise that only 9% of Britons want life to return to "normal" after the coronavirus outbreak is over (Source: YouGov, April 2020).
But as Claire Colebrook, professor of English, philosophy, and women’s, studies at Pennsylvania State University reminds us, it’s not that the world has fallen apart so much as we are rediscovering its (and our own) true nature.
If the world feels newly traumatic to those of us in the rich, white, affluent, leisured, developed world, it’s because we are rediscovering what it is to live amidst fragility. Writes Prof. Colebrook: “ ‘We’ have lost our world of security, we seem to be telling ourselves, and will soon be living like all those peoples on whom we have relied to bear the true cost of what it means for ‘us’ to be ‘human’ ”.
But the fact of the matter is that the fragility we are experiencing is not a bug in the system, but a feature. It is something most people in the world know and experience every single day. So if you’re in the rich, developed world…. welcome back.
It’s an environment in which business too, has rediscovered its fragility. And the fragility of the systems it relies upon.
We’ve built a global supply chain that runs on outsourcing, just-in-time delivery, 15-30 days’ product inventory, Chinese manufacturing capacity, and razor thin margins - and the coronavirus has exposed just how delicate it is. The rest of us are just dangling, precariously off the end of it.
The Institute for Supply Management, which conducts monthly economic surveys, found that nearly 75 percent of the companies it contacted in late February and early March reported some kind of supply-chain disruption due to the coronavirus. And that 44 percent of the companies didn’t have a plan to deal with this kind of disruption.
Predictions of lasting, fundamental change are like all predictions, merely guesses. But what we are observing (rather than merely hypothesizing) is an acceleration.
Some businesses are finding that all of a sudden they can after all find the will to cut through the sluggishness and conservatism of their own organisational process and catapult themselves into the future.
The lucky few are finding that the gravitational forces of this epic Fucked Up Situation have given them a slingshot into total market dominance.
While others are finding themselves being catapulted into obsolescence.
Meanwhile budgets are being decapitated. The final coup de grâce to round off marketing’s inexorable decline into short-termism and withdrawal from anything that looks like sustainable long-term value creation, aka real marketing.
Nevermind that brand valuation studies validated by The Marketing Accountability Standards Board estimate that brand value alone contributes an average of 19.5% of enterprise value.
One day when we are sure the streets are not filled with zombie hordes we’ll emerge from our bunkers blinking in the sunlight and we won’t give a fuck what brand of toothpaste it is just so long as its toothpaste. Wonderful.
While the pundits debate whether our world will be temporarily or permanently changed, the ripping off of the Band-Aid of self-delusion gives us an opportunity to draw some overdue lessons. To decide what we will choose to leave behind.
For us that begins with understanding our role and place in things. And we just got a brutal lesson in perspective. Though culture is our trade, it is always a weaker lever on the lives of everyday people than economics and politics. And we cannot advertise our way to a better, safer, fairer, more sustainable world. Forgetting this risks the quality of our work and clouds genuine opportunities to make a difference when they do arise.
The fact of the matter is that the best, most valuable thing we can do is help (good) client businesses stay in business, provide people with the goods and services they rely on, pay their corporate taxes, provide people with gainful employment… and thus contribute to that thing we call Society.
While we are not all-powerful, we are not without considerable influence. But we’ve allowed this sphere of influence to have been confined - and condemned ourselves to operating in a zero growth industry which for almost 100 years has represented about no more than 1 percent of U.S. GDP
The fact is that agencies long ago allowed themselves to be boxed in. We defined ourselves by output (ads) not outcomes (commercial impact) and left influence at the door and money (lots of it) on the table.
We understand human nature better than any consultancy. We understand culture - both fast and slow - better than any consultancy. We know how to stir the emotions, ignite conversation, build lasting memories, create fame, shape behaviours, make the familiar feel unfamiliar and the unfamiliar feel familiar far better than any Acme Consultancy.
Yet in the world of my old mentor Laurence Green, “we’ve allowed our business to have its tasks sliced and diced in the style of a sub-prime mortgage bundler. A corporate task set by the chief executive, reframed as a comms task by the marketing director, refined by the brand consultancy and reduced by the ad agency to the stuff advertising can do - grow awareness, nurture engagement. Too many links, too indirect and weak a connection between commercial possibilities and creative resolution.”
Unless they’re part of the lucky few, client businesses are facing an existential crisis they are singularly untrained, and unprepared for. There is no past practice, playbook, or inherited wisdom that can help. Literally everybody is making it up as they go along.
A collapse in both the supply and the demand side of the global economy, a resilient and intelligent enemy that is trying to kill us, the radical reshaping and suppressing of ordinary public life… the situation we are in resembles being in a state of war not merely a brutal economic crisis.
So let’s be in no doubt. There are no ad-shaped problems any more.
There never were but at least now we’ve caught up with reality.
And bullshit is dead.
The bullshit pushers just got robbed at economic gunpoint and have been left standing with nothing left in their pockets but their Instagram accounts.
The entire self-indulgent edifice of commercially-deaf, evidence-free adland rhetoric (‘purpose’, anyone?) just got exposed for the emperor’s new clothes it is. And a harsh, cold wind is blowing.
The unwitting, unthinking neoliberal surrogates that provided aircover for the propaganda fiction that markets and corporations can ‘fill the void’ and fix the problems that government cannot or will not solve are looking like the preening, politically illiterate hacks they always were.
Because things got really simple, really fast. What did a creative solution do for people? For a client’s business? This is all that matters now. Finally adland has been forced to grow up, act its age and learn the overdue lesson that ours is an outcome-based business.
Recognizing this represents creativity’s best chance at (finally) liberating itself from the self-imposed limitations it has laboured under for too long. If crisis really is as they say, an opportunity then this is our best shot at a truly radical creative renaissance
Professor Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at Kings College London and author of Strategy: A History defined strategy as “Getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest.” Good strategy will find itself in high demand.
As a result, it will find itself challenged to strap on its grownup pants, identify the biggest challenges to forward progress, and devise a coherent approach to overcoming them.
“Strategy” writes Richard Rumelt (he’s ruthlessly good on it) “is scarcity’s child”. Well mama and papa are Oliver Twist dirt poor and starving right now and nobody has the time, patience, or financing to bankroll creative spread-betting and shots in the dark.
If you’re using your strategists to bring up the rear and wheel in the wagons of Powerpoint post-rationalization you’re using them wrong. They’re your Imperial Stormtroopers. The tip of the spear. Send them in hard. And early.
Meanwhile the only creative business on the planet to have a department dedicated to creativity might just wake up to the inescapable reality that creativity is the art of solving problems not a job title. This will be an entirely a good thing.
The mindless distinction so long promoted by narrow self interest between strategy (‘theory’) and so-called creativity (‘execution’) will collapse in the face of clients asking for urgent help to solve or at least help them survive, the existential threats facing them. The need for agility and decisiveness will squeeze out the old tolerance for politics and turf wars.
Instead, the much-awaited epiphany that strategy is not theory but a set of coherent actions driven by intent and that everything (who to target, what to say, where to show up, what story to tell, how to design it, how to cast it….) is therefore strategic will drive the disciplines of strategy and creative ever closer together. This too, will be an entirely good thing.
By the way - anybody miss Cannes? Or at least that parts of it that were not rosé-soaked? Exactly. Anyway, moving on.
For their part if they want to leverage the creative problem solving skills at their disposal, then client organizations are going to have to start giving their agency partners real problems to solve and jettison the bureaucratic psychobabble logjam known as the client brief.
Client organizations are going to have to identify (real) problems to be solved, stop passing off asset requests as real briefs, and give their agency partners access not just to the marketing department but to the full suite of disciplines within the organisation.
But there’s a world of difference between delivering pre-determined creative assets for pre-determined advertising tasks and surrounding a business with creativity.
Surrounding a business with creativity is going to be easier to accomplish if you enjoy and invest in real partner relationships. If you insist on treating your agency partners as one-night stands (and make them compete for that privilege) they’re only ever going to give you one thing.
Disrupted supply chains, choked demand, volatile markets, stalled cashflow, jeopardised business models, rollercoaster consumer confidence, dramatic changes in social behaviour and norms, uncoordinated global responses… Covid-19 is the canary in civilization’s coal-mine.
It cannot only ever be about ‘growth’. We’re all going to have to get good at building resilience into brands and the businesses that sit behind them. That means having and exercising the intellectual curiosity to learn about the business.
Where are the vulnerabilities within a business? Where is it leaking value? How can we build in learning mechanisms so that we adapt to change and shocks to the system (there will be more)? These are the kinds of questions - not “what’s the brief, then?” - all of us need to start asking.
Note that I say all of us. The ‘creatives’ that will have a future/rule the future will reject the infantilization that their predecessors hid behind or had thrust upon them. They will demand a seat at every conversation that matters. Not just at the creative briefing.
The brand bit of building in resilience really isn’t rocket science. It never was.
Strong brands help generate future cashflows by sustaining customer preference (i.e. they keep coming back), reducing price elasticity (i.e. people are willing to pay more), creating retailer preference (i.e securing distribution), creating new option spaces (i.e opening up new sources of future value), etc.
Yet we’ve singularly failed to convince the C-suite that strong brands are vital to having a future. We’d rather bang on about “shaping culture” (whatever that means) than talk about shaping business fortunes and futures. Don’t believe this? Well my data beats your whining rhetoric.
While 73% of business leaders already cite business resilience as a business priority - only 55% of business leaders believe that a strong brand impacts business resilience.
And while 71% of business leaders cite future cashflow as a business priority - only 49% of business leaders believe that a strong brand impacts future cashflow.
Whichever way you look at it, this is a collective failure of the first order. So much for effectiveness awards and all those “billions of impressions” in your case study.
P.S. We are storing up a shit ton of trouble for the future. The businesses and brands (and the STEM graduates that own/run them) shaping our lives and dominating the corporate landscape have little or no background or interest in the inherited wisdom and assumptions of marketing and brand building.
Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. Creativity hasn’t died. (It bears repeating).
Amidst the sea of incrementalists, there will still be good, visionary clients who believe in the power of creativity and ideas to transform a business and give it a new, previously unimagined future. They will win - as they have always done - because they will do what others cannot, will not, or dare not do.
One more unwelcome thought. The role of advertising as a first strike cultural change agent is highly disputed. Politics, economics, and demographics have transformational firepower we do not. But while we might not instigate change, we are good at fanning its flames.
We are at our most influential when we are jumping on the proverbial bandwagon. There’s zero shame in that. We should feel proud and confident in that role. To borrow the words of the anti-globalization activist and writer Richard Grossman, we create “the images and metaphors of our time”. We are kerosene.
So we should be asking what can we accelerate? What can we illuminate? What can we normalise? What can we help scale?
And conversely, what should we cease accelerating, illuminating, normalising, and scaling?
We might, for example, wish to refuse to treat women as meat puppets existing only for male domination and satisfaction. Or refuse to indulge in woke-washing, green-washing, or marketing stunts masquerading as corporate commitment.
Or we might wish to say no to media which enable untruths about the climate or the pandemic to spread.
Or we might wish only to fund responsible media - the ones which tell the truth and keep the electorate properly informed.
Or we might wish to start putting our own house in order, model the change we wish to see in the world, and address the long and inexcusably neglected under-representation of women and minorities in our industry.
There is then, much to wish for and much to be hopeful for. There is much to want to leave behind. Much to be purged and excised. Much to recommit ourselves to. Much to reinvent. Much to fix with a steely clear-eyed gaze. And much to cast onto the bonfire of our vanities.
Yes, of course this fucked up shit that we living and dying through should scare the crap out of us. Not just because of the unfathomable personal human tragedy contained in the daily death count updates. But also because of what it reveals about us.
Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson talks about how “We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.” Writes Robinson:
“In many ways, we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live. The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990 - as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.”
Yet amidst the fragility and carnage, the suffering and the fear, the anxiety and dislocation and the endless vistas of existential angst… we can, we must, still hope. And on the subject of the exercise of hope (it will not magically come to us without the necessary work) the writer Rebecca Solnit has some of the most necessary and most inspiring words for us to live and to work by…
“To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it’s is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk… I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door... because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. … To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable”.
Hope is an axe.
What door will you break down?