Brands up their game in ethical advertising

By Marcie MacLellan

It’s difficult to explain most adverts to my four-year-old son. Ads that tell him that pink is for girls, girls are for boys, and boys are superheroes in the making. Instead, I encourage him to ask questions about what those “pictures” are trying to tell him.

On the Underground recently, he spotted an advert featuring a young woman in bed, surrounded by teddy bears. So many teddy bears, in fact, she needs to put her extra ones into storage (the storage company being the advertiser). My son asks: “They’re saying she’s greedy?”

“Yes, yes they are. But not deliberately.”

This kind of excess is something consumers, at any age, are increasingly disinterested in. They were never stupid but now they are savvier. Consumers don’t want advertisers to lie to them. They don’t want advertisers to sell them stuff they don’t need. And, more than ever, they’d like their advertisers to be socially aware.

That may be why 2015 has been dubbed the year of the feelgood ad. Campaigns over the past year have been stuffed full of cute animals, charming children and tear-jerking good deeds. John Lewis’s Christmas ad didn’t pack the punch it usually does because so many other brands are playing the “warm fuzzies” game. But manipulating sentimentality is no longer enough.

“It seems to me that ever since the crash of 2008, the straightforward capitalist commercial model has got a pretty poor reputation,” said Lucinda Broadbent, co-founder of Glaswegian company Media Co-op. “People are looking for alternatives, and it’s about time.”

Media Co-op, a workers co-operative, is on a very short list of media production companies who can call themselves a social enterprise. They use advertising to tackle social problems ranging from domestic violence to improving public health and reinvest back into their business and community. In their latest work, a two-minute film called A Strong Man, refugee men from the Maryhill Integration Network call on other men to end violence against women.

Of course, delivering do-good campaigns is far easier when the clients served exist entirely for that purpose. But can advertising change the world for the better when it’s also trying to turn a profit?

Broadbent says: “A lot of people working in the media are very principled and go into it because they want to communicate or they want to express their creativity. But I suppose because there is a lot of money to be made, the industry has attracted financially motivated people.”

The good news is that principled professionals are now peeking above the parapet. And it’s starting to show. It’s not only their ethics talking, it’s because consumers are responding. Millennials in particular are demanding that businesses take on the bigger issues like climate change, social equality and animal rights.

Naysayers step aside. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is not a fad. It’s not even a differentiator; it’s merely the price of entry. According to the Deloitte Millennial Survey 2015, most millennials believe that businesses should make a positive impact on their community and the world at large.

So it’s no surprise that more companies are lining up to sell sustainable products, reduce their carbon footprint, support charitable causes and develop socially astute campaigns that inspire. #LikeAGirl for Always, Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches and Made of More by Guinness have shone a spotlight on the powerful messages advertisers can dream up and deliver. In doing so, they have created an audience that feels good about buying their products and then takes to Twitter to say how good they feel. Emirates’ diva-inspired advert starring Jennifer Aniston, on the other hand, did not. Neither did Bloomingdale’s.

“Consumers around the world are saying loud and clear that a brand’s social purpose is among the factors that influence purchase decisions,” said Amy Fenton, global leader of public development and sustainability at Nielsen. “This behaviour is on the rise and it provides opportunities for meaningful impact in our communities, in addition to helping to grow share for brands.”

The numbers add up. Neilsen’s global retail analysis shows increased sales for brands with sustainability claims on packaging or active marketing of CSR efforts. What’s more, 55% of global online consumers across 60 countries say they are willing to pay more for products and services provided by companies that are committed to positive social and environmental impact. On top of this, The 2015 Brand Footprint report published by Kantar Worldpanel shows that brands with a social conscience grew in popularity, Dove among them.

Admittedly, the teddy bear storage dilemma advertised by Lovespace was harmless enough. But given it ran in the same month that Project Paddington collected over 30,000 teddy bears across the UK and delivered them to refugee children, they may have missed the mark.

“It’s no longer a question of whether consumers care about social impact. Consumers do care and show they do through their actions,” says Fenton. “Now the focus is on determining how your brand can effectively create shared value by marrying the appropriate social cause and consumer segments.”

Coming on 20 years in the ad game, it will be hard for me to look at an advert without seeing the product being pushed – which, of course, is rather the point. But I am starting to feel optimistic about what the future can hold. A future where advertisers can sell products along with ideas they actually believe in. Ideas that can spark interesting conversations with my young son that go beyond the things he can buy and extend to the wider world he lives in.

Read Marcie's full article as it appeared in The Guardian.

The rise of ‘empowertising’: How to successfully use feminism as the starting point of a solid marketing strategy

I’m in a good mood today. Excellent in fact. I’ve reached my goal weight, I’ve discovered a fabulous new conditioning treatment, and I’ve mastered three new tricks to please my lover in bed. What more could a girl ask for? Oh wait. We’re asking for a hell of a lot more. And advertisers are finally clocking on.

For far too many years, women have been bombarded with far too many clichés by advertisers pushing their wares. Some more dangerous than others. But now there is the slightest whiff of change in the air. Advertisers are getting braver. They are starting to treat women as, well, people. Though it’s not as easy as it looks. Advertisers like Dove, Always and Verizon are being complimented and criticised in equal measure for throwing these tired clichés aside.

Critics find these brands guilty of ‘empowertising’. It’s a new term coined by Andi Zeisler, co-founder of Bitch Media, based on a much older concept – commodity activism. Defined by Henry Jenkins, author of Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times, this is “a process by which social action is increasingly understood through the ways it is mapped onto merchandising practices, market incentives, and corporate profits.”

But today’s feminists are questioning the effects of commodity activism. They rightfully ask if this approach is actually empowering for today’s financially viable and highly desirable demographic of females. In other words, some feel that using messages of empowerment to sell beauty products is a sneaky state of affairs.

On the other hand, surely the fact that advertisers have finally recognised that feminism is not going anywhere, that women have different needs, viewpoints and priorities, is a very good thing indeed. And the industry seems to agree. From the same city that banned flats from its red carpet, Cannes has now produced the Glass Lion, created in partnership with LeanIn.Org, which recognises work that addresses issues of gender inequality or prejudice through the conscious representation of gender in advertising.

“I think that commodity activism can be an important form of social activism, if the goals of such activism are not primarily organised around the accumulation of profit or building a corporate brand,” writes Jenkins. “For example, activism about girls’ self-esteem is hot right now – a whole industry has been built around it. With the Dove ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, the company encouraged a sort of ‘co-production’ with consumers, and called attention to the exclusionary (and often racist and classist) norms of beauty culture.”

Sure, brands are trying to shift products. No shocker there. But that doesn’t stop me from embracing campaigns like Verizon’s ‘Inspire Her Mind’ which focuses on gender equality in STEM and Always’ #LikeAGirl campaign, which aims to take away the negative stigma of something that happens to every woman, every single month. They join the welcome ranks of Unilever’s Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaign, which, at the time, was a bright light in the world of over sexualised, brutally photo shopped supermodels.

And now, Unilever is at it again. And its reasons for doing so are as much ethical as they are economical.“Over 70 per cent of the people making the decision to buy our brands are women. Our future growth depends on meeting their needs and aspirations and on supporting an increase in their livelihoods by fully and formally participating in the economy,” state the powers-that-be at Unilever. “We consider the advancement of women’s rights and women’s economic inclusion as a priority.”

In 2014, Unilever stated its ambitions to empower five million women by 2020. On Do it Day, my team’s goal on its behalf was a little more regional. We wanted to work with Unilever to engage female millennials in Brazil, one of its biggest markets, in entrepreneurship via a social community which inspires, informs and connects budding entrepreneurs with potentially valuable connections and content. In a country were 95 per cent of women would change their bodies if they could, we are doing so with the message that the beauty of their brains is at least as important as the beauty of their bodies.

As for how Unilever deals with the potential contradictions of using empowering messages for women to sell beauty products, it says it is all about the confidence its messages and its products help to encourage: “We believe self-confidence is a powerful enabler for women to achieve their ambitions,” says Lucile Tardy of Unilever. “So if we can offer products that answer their needs while making them feel more confident and ready to go after their goals, it makes sense for our brands to communicate empowering messages.”

I’m admittedly treading cautiously on this issue, but I do think there are worse things to be deemed guilty of than using feminism as a starting point for a solid marketing strategy. That’s because my expertise lies in telling the right stories to the right audiences. And lately, it is starting to feel as if those stories can be told more honestly, and with better intentions. After all, successfully marketing products to women means truly understanding them, not painting them with the same sexist, condescending brush.

Call me an optimist, but in the not-too-distant future I’m hoping gender will play a far less significant role in marketing altogether, no matter how positively it’s spun. In the meantime, Laura Jordan Bambach, co-founder of SheSays, summed it best when she begged the question: “Are campaigns such as ‘#LikeAGirl’ good pieces of work? In my opinion, yes.  Am I cynical about where it comes from? You know, I just don’t give a shit. In a time when everything seems marketed at young men, telling them how they are going to be superstars, girls can at least have their own their own point of view.”

Originally published in The Drum, November 2015 issue. 

Forget the hype, transmedia is just good advertising

By Marcie MacLellan
 
I’ve got to admit, I wasn’t particularly moved when I first heard the term “transmedia”. I came across it while participating in a development programme for filmmakers as part of the Venice International Film Festival. It was dubbed the “next big thing” and was supposedly transforming the way films were produced and promoted. But I didn’t buy it. I was sure it was just cross-media repackaged and re-marketed to the people who invented it in the first place.

I’ve since discovered that there are many ways to describe this new buzzword which first took the world of film and television by storm. It’s since proved so successful; it is now making its way across virtually every industry that relies on advertising to turn a profit. But apparently there is one thing it is not – and that is cross-media.

Using the ever-reliable Wikipedia, cross-media is described as “a media property, service, story or experience distributed across media platforms using a variety of media forms.” Meanwhile, the inventor of the term itself, Henry Jenkins, defines transmedia in his book Convergence Culture as representing “the integration of entertainment experiences across a range of different media platforms.”

Using these descriptions alone, it sounds a bit either/or to me. But it is when Jenkins takes his definition of transmedia one step further that the difference in approaches – versus technology – becomes clear. He writes: “transmedia immerses an audience in a story’s universe through a number of dispersed entry points, providing a comprehensive and coordinated experience of a complex story.”

In layman’s terms, the resulting difference lies largely in the perspective a brand story takes, the detail it offers and the impression it creates. With cross-media you generally start with one concept and deliver it across all media available. With transmedia, each medium that your audience interacts with should serve a very specific purpose, while allowing your story to unfold like chapters in a book. And like a good book, more of the narrative of the story is shared over time, allowing for a deeper connection with its characters. And that’s where, as a producer of content, transmedia can be far more exciting than cross-media ever was.

It is important to remember that “this practice isn’t device-driven, but is platform driven as it is the platform that subtly dictates and influences audience reactions, social and behavioural trends and user experiences,” writes Allison Norrinton in her article, Transmedia Storytelling – What’s it all about?.
“The bottom line is that with a solid transmedia strategy in place everything remains connected by the same central narrative and theme, but each channel excels at what it does best, rather than bending to fit a central idea that’s being repurposed for multi platforms.”

Film franchises and global brands are embracing transmedia, from The Blair Witch Project to The Matrix, from Coca Cola to Intel and Toshiba. When Jonathan Mildenhall, vice president of global advertising strategy at Coca Cola, spoke to Forbes last year he described the complexity that transmedia has demanded of their campaigns, particularly in relation to their commercial “Happiness Factory”.

‘It was an ad, and only as good as the media dollars that we put behind it,’ he told Forbes. ‘But transmedia helped us understand how the story arc and the narrative of the Happiness Factory could evolve over time and how it could be used through different channels.’

He went on to explain that this narrative involved detailed descriptions of everything that made up the fictional world depicted in the ‘Happiness Inside’ commercial, ranging from character names to make-believe locations, and continued this story across videogames and social networking campaigns, as well as traditional media outlets.

It isn’t just global brands with million-dollar budgets that are getting on board. Our local clients are also starting to embrace transmedia, with London School of Marketing (LSM) among them. Targeting an audience of local and international students who want to pursue a wide range of designations to further their career, the team behind LSM believes that education is a life-long process. That is why they want to do more than raise brand awareness – they want to connect with their prospects and customers over the long-term.

‘We are new to transmedia but are big believers in what it can do. We don’t just want to reach prospective students to tell them how much our programmes cost and what they include, we want to involve them in the full story about how the education we offer can make a long-term difference,’ said Anton Dominique, COO/CFO of London School of Marketing.

‘We have been communicating with email, blogs, white papers, ebooks, social media, webinars and more recently films – but we have been doing it from our perspective. What we want to do now is use our marketing efforts to better engage and represent the viewpoint of our different audiences, from international students to experienced professionals pursuing their MBAs.’

Like Dominique, marketing professionals know that as the world of the consumer changes, so too must their marketing approaches – hence the hype behind transmedia. I still think the term itself is a bit overhyped; after all, transmedia isn’t exactly ground breaking. But when the fit is right, I do have to agree that it can be game-changing.

Customers are the ones deciding what advertising they will respond to and how. To reach them, it is obvious that we need to tell brand stories that target audiences want to hear again and again. In that way, a transmedia approach is simply good marketing, managed strategically, with more innovative and personalised tools in place to deliver it. And that’s not so hard to buy into.

Originally published in TalkBusiness

By Will Fielding

Greengrocers are famed for their flippant use of apostrophes. But in light of the current fashion for major companies to do away with the possessive apostrophe in their brand names, perhaps Greengrocers will cease to be seen as linguistic oafs and instead be known as marketing trendsetters.

In the world of branding, seemingly anything goes when it comes to using possessive apostrophes in company names. There are two main camps in terms of usage. Those who do – such as McDonald’s, Levi’s and Sainsbury’s. Those who don’t – such as Barclays, Ladbrokes and Harrods. And then the odd company, such as Waterstone’s, who have decided to straddle the fence, using apostrophes in their text but leaving them out of their brand.

As the term ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’ suggests, people have a long history of battling with this awkward piece of punctuation. When Barclays was asked about the lack of one in their brand, they said “Barclays is no longer associated with the family name,” and that the apostrophe had “just disappeared over the years.” This seems to suggest that they consider the sound of their brand to have more value than the layout.

Contemporary language is forever being shortened and simplified. Emails, texts and social media have been lobbying for people to dissect their language into ever more manageable chunks since they began. Also, now that so many companies see their futures being reliant on online business, if they wish their brand name to resemble their URL, they must first remove all punctuation.

There is no single reason why many companies have decided to ignore the strict rules of the possessive apostrophe. I suspect that it usually comes down to a combination of things, from brand independence and contemporary usage to the stylistic bias of designers and the pressures they face when tasked with bringing freshness to tired old brands. Personally though, we tend to recommend keeping them in to help communicate a brand’s personality. But then, being writers, we would say that, wouldn’t we?

Putting Diversity on the Agenda

By Marcie MacLellan

When it comes to tackling diversity in film, it’s proven to be a challenging issue. Generally speaking, the majority of people I’ve talked to or worked with agree that the industry is long overdue a shake up and that the benefits to be had will be many. But, exactly how we are going to better represent the world we live in – both in front of the camera and behind it – is a much more difficult topic to agree on.

The BFI is taking a stand on this issue. And what’s more, it is putting its money where its mouth is. For any new film seeking BFI backed funding, it must firstpass its new three-tick system that guarantees the film is meeting at least the minimum in its diversity requirements. This means reflecting diversity in gender, social mobility, race and disability.

This is something I will be taking to heart, given that I am currently a part of Creative England’s leading film development programme, iFeatures3, supported by the BBC, Creative Skillset and the BFI. With gender diversity among its requirements, it is also particularly relevant to me as I’m among a very small percentage of female producers in this industry. But gender, rightly so, is just the beginning.

To make such a significant challenge feel manageable, the BFI has published a thorough set of guidelines. The goal is to get at least one tick from each of their three categories.

1. Onscreen diversity: This bit is fairly straight forward. The BFI are looking for films where”the narrative reflects diversity through the story and its characters,and explicitly and predominantly explores issues of identity relating to ethnicity or national origins, women, people with disabilities, sexual identity, age and people from a socially disadvantaged background.” They also place value on films that “attach value to aspects in relation to religion or beliefs.”

2. Offscreen diversity: This gets slightly more complicated – not in its concept but in its execution. It starts off easily enough saying that the Director, Scriptwriter, Composer or Cinematographer must be from a diverse background. It then goes into very specific breakdowns of percentages required across heads of departments, crew and production company staff.

3. Creating opportunities: This all comes down to the production company itself. In a nutshell, it essentially asks that production companies offer paid internship, employment or trainee placements to people from diverse backgrounds.

Fortunately, in the case of our feature, Apostasy, we’re well on the way to earning our three ticks. In fact, the key elements of our story were a perfect match from the start. Our lead characters are female, our story is set amongst the Asian population of Oldham, a key supporting character is disabled and our film centres around the subject of religion. When it comes to diversity behind the camera, our scriptwriter and myself are female as is our preferred DoP. That said, we’ve still got more work to do to get a perfect score.

As for why the BFI is implementing these new guidelines, their recent press release summed it up best. It is looking “for a fair reflection of people from different backgrounds in every aspect of our work – for the sake of greater creativity and authenticity, to widen the talent pool, to offer fair access to the industry and to introduce new voices and untold stories from across the UK. Diversity is not only good for creativity, it’s also good for jobs. It supports economic growth, it taps into what audiences want to see and it makes good business sense.”

This blog is part of our series with Birds Eye View, an organisation that showcases and explores the outstanding contribution of women in film. 

The art of storytelling starts with a story recce

By Marcie MacLellan

There are moments in life where Dorothy’s line from Wizard of Oz rings true. As a small town Canadian lass dining on ‘The Great British Breakfast’ while on a (heavily discounted) first-class train from London to The North, I experienced that “Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore” vibe just this morning.

My destination was the admittedly unglamorous, but equally intriguing, Manchester – Oldham to be precise. I was joining director Dan Kokotajlo and writer Charlotte Wise to do a story recce for our feature film project, Apostasy. About two sisters raised in the Jehovah’s Witness faith, it so happens that this is the same project chosen for Birds Eye View’s inaugural Filmonomics programme earlier this year.

It was at a Filmonomics event that I first met Christopher Granier-Deferre, Executive Producer of iFeatures, Creative England’s innovative low budget filmmaking initiative. Shortly afterwards, Apostasy was one of 18 films they selected for development, drawn from just under 400 submissions. Three projects will receive £350,000 to bring their film to the big screen. In the meantime, in the words of iFeatures, we will now “undergo an intensive process of creative and commercial development, with support from partners and industry professionals, with the aim of getting greenlit in March 2015.”

But before that we’re doing a story recce. And here are four reasons why:

Get inspired

Creatively a story recce can provide both insight and inspiration. When the setting is right, your characters suddenly come to life, move around their world, and take on new attributes in keeping with their environment. This particular recce also helped Charlotte and me to better understand Dan’s vision; the unpredictable sources of beauty he sees in the peaks district, the stunning contrasts in the old terraced houses set against the imposing backdrop of an old mill, the drab setting of the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall which is both passive and imposing at the same time.

Turn vision into reality

There are always practical concerns for each location. Is it quiet enough, bright enough, interesting enough? Is there a power source, light source, source of inspiration? What is the distance between each location and how will this affect budget and timing? Would any sane insurer insure it? Is there parking? Every element, no matter how small, can and should be considered. Fortunately, this particular recce alleviated my concerns from a production standpoint. Scenes with farm animals, complicated visual effects and derelict mills not only seemed possible, but entirely and affordably feasible. I can now visualise the film on screen – but more importantly, I can plan the detailed budget that will get it there.

Delve into details

The best bits about a story recce are the details it provides you with, each contributing to the realistic development of your characters and their actions. For us, we came away with answers to some of our more perplexing questions. A broken fence and rusty ladder found in the real world told us how our main character could logistically find her way into an abandoned mill. A littered and soulless street provided perspective into how two young girls would feel alone in heart of Oldham. A young boy playing on a tattered mattress gave us ideas for unexpected sources of joy and playfulness. Details such as these will go a long way in adding greater depth and realism to our story and its setting.

Entice investors

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. By backing up your pitch with photography of key locations, you can invite investors into your world. This gives you – and them – the tools needed to convey the heart of the story as clearly as possible. The right photos of the right settings can also go a long way in alleviating – or at least addressing – any budget concerns that decision makers might have. In our case, we want iFeatures3 to get as deep an understanding of our story and our characters as we do, and that means painting a clear picture of what they can expect in its final form.

As anyone in the world of film knows, a recce is an essential part of pre-production and helps you to assess locations and research stories, both from a creative and practical perspective. Like us, even if you time is tight and your budget is tighter, a story recce should always remain a vital part of storytelling.

This blog is part of our series with Birds Eye View, an organisation that showcases and explores the outstanding contribution of women in film.

Our feature film project is selected for full development with iFeatures3

Eight teams have been selected from the iFeatures slate for further development funding, as the UK’s most exciting low budget feature film initiative from Creative England enters its full development phase. 

In early 2015, three of the projects will be greenlit, each with a budget of £350,000. Partners Creative England, the BFI and BBC Films will fully-finance, with the BBC pre-buying UK free TV rights. The accompanying professional development programme is supported by Creative Skillset’s Film Skills Fund.

Christopher Granier-Deferre, iFeatures Executive Producer, said: “Covering a wide range of genres from dark unsettling thrillers to intoxicating period dramas while tackling the universal themes of grief, guilt and pride, and raising thought-provoking questions about religious, racial and sexual identity across a variety of locations, the eight filmmaking teams represent an eclectic mix of stories and illustrate the rich diversity of voices and ideas to be found in the English regions.

“Selecting the eight teams for full development was an incredibly tough process for the panel. This was a remarkably rich cohort and I can't praise the departing teams enough for all the hard work they put in to get this far. I know we've not heard the last of these wonderful projects by any means.”
 
You can find out more about our film, Apostasy, here.