It’s time for adland to give something back
The weekend marked the beginning of the festive retail season, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday seeing the nation flock en masse to discounted retailers. Over those three days, consumerist hysteria saw online sales alone surpass £1.5 billion, giving brands a huge kickstart in the run-up to Christmas.
But what about the brands that don’t reap the rewards from Britain’s shopping-loving consumers? Those that struggle to get noticed, not just during the Christmas period, but all year round?
On Tuesday Mindshare donated 900 hours of client time to tackle briefs on behalf of three charities that find it hard to attract marketing.
We spoke to Lea Meszarosova, account manager, business planning, Mindshare UK, who gave us an exclusive insight into the work they’ve been doing – and why adland needs to give something back.
Tuesday played host to Giving Tuesday, a concept that has come over from the States; but unlike its big brothers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s dedicated to devoting some time to those less fortunate than ourselves.
This year appears to have been the year that Black Friday finally took off in the UK and the orgy of consumerist rioting didn’t exactly show us in the best light. Whilst Cyber Monday was more restrained, in part due to its online nature, spending over the weekend here in the UK was £2.5 billion. On Amazon alone 68 products were sold per second.
We work in adland and consumerism is what brings in the bacon, but sometimes there is a need to take a step back, reflect and do something for the greater good.
We are one of 800 organisations in the UK that took part in Giving Tuesday and we’d love there be more than 800. There are 4.9 million companies in the UK; if just 1% of those companies took part then we’d be able to offer real value to charities, especially in adland where we can offer services that charities badly need.
It’s a practical move too; we have found in interviews that the second question asked by applicants, especially grads and school leavers, is about our CSR policies. Today’s talent wants to work somewhere that they are proud of and that understands and shares their values.
For Giving Tuesday we worked with three charities that don’t have any media budget to come up with ideas to engage, and that fundraise only by using their owned media. The three charities are:
Bowel & Cancer Research, which is aiming to increase awareness of bowel cancer and chronic bowel disease amongst the general public. The charity only raised £400,000 last year, in comparison to the average top 1,000 charity which receives approximately £20 million.
These top charities have a larger budget than Bowel & Cancer research raises on an annual basis.
Compassion in World Farming aims to get consumers to shop for higher welfare products. They are particularly focused on the welfare of broiler chickens for which interest level is low.
The Connection at St Martins is a homeless charity that works on the frontline providing services to rough sleepers. However, as they are less well known than other homeless charities and consist of a small team with limited resources, they struggle to get the awareness and donations of other charities.
On Tuesday each Mindshare member of staff donated three hours of their time to focusing on the brief for each of these charities. Some of the ideas we came up with for Bowel & Cancer Research included, ‘Belfie with a cause’ – an idea to create an Ice Bucket Challenge or No Make-Up Selfie moment for bowel cancer.
Variations on this theme included ‘Dare to share’, where people would share an embarrassing childhood photo, and #CheckForChange, which would encourage people to notice change by posting their first Facebook photo and latest photo.
For Compassion in World Farming one idea took the insight that people love sharing pictures of food and positive news on social platforms, so we came up with the idea of a campaign using the #HappyFood hashtag, encouraging people to share that they have opted for a higher welfare product.
Others ideas focused on showing people what the conditions of battery farmed chickens are like by putting people in a similar situation.
Our ideas for The Connection at St Martin’s included the Pick up a Penny challenge where people collect their spare and unused change from around the house and donate that sum by text, whilst sharing online.
Other initiatives included opening a micro bank at St Martins to create an eBay store powered by the homeless, creating a donations shop so that people can make tangible donations, buy winter clothing or similar to the homeless.
By offering our time and imagination we hope to be able to make a real difference to our chosen three charities and we’d love the rest of adland to get involved with some of these smaller charities who are in dire need of marketing nous, not just on Giving Tuesday but throughout the year.