The New Communications

A few years back my company was accused by a deeply misguided business journalist as not operating in the 'real economy'. Our focus on social goals, environmental issues and arts and culture clearly got him riled. He saw the impending age of austerity and public sector cuts as a signal that an agency like ours would be certain to fail.

The debt-fuelled, hyper-consumption based 'real economy' was about to falter, fold his magazine and put him out of a job, but regardless of his frame of reference it was clear that he didn't 'get' the idea that there was a different world of communications out there.

So it's time to establish more clearly the new communications. 

What's it about? It's the critical revelation that you can sell great ideas and urgent issues of our time just as effectively and with as much flair as you can sell fast moving consumer goods. The campaigns and communications that emerge from the new communications are progressive, honest and effective. They can be energy campaigns that save money on bills, they can be recruitment campaigns for volunteers, carers or civic champions, they can raise money, they can get you off the sofa and out into a nature reserve; the new communications may even make you feel differently about the town, city or village where you live.

It's time to explode the idea that creative communications, by which I mean everything from advertising to direct marketing, media relations, social media campaigns and even the odd flash mob, is purely about selling stuff that we don’t really need.

The conventional ‘Mad Men’ world of consumer marketing is just one aspect of human communications. What other kinds of communications do we messy but wonderful humans indulge in?

There’s gossip, chatter with friends or colleagues and keeping up with family or loved ones, increasingly a strand of communications that is served through social media channels like Facebook or Twitter. There are more formal channels too. There’s public information - what time does the library open? How can I learn to swim? What day will my wheelie bin be emptied? After that there's social marketing. Much of this is health related (get fit, stop smoking, drink less) but it can also cover social calls to action, such as fostering a child, or changes in environmental behaviour.

Local communities communicate in their own distinctive way, too. Engagement at the community level is often overlooked as a critical part of communications. From the photocopied newsletter to online forums, street stalls or a notice pinned to a church door, local neighbourhoods can energise around an issue and then start to communicate.

There are political campaigns for both single issues and to get elected. There are social and environmental campaigns looking to exert change on politics, business or public opinion. Places communicate and brand or promote themselves, there is entertainment, fundraising, religious evangelism, even military propaganda - the ‘munitions of the mind’ - is a form of creative communications.

I've yet to land a brief that covers military propaganda but over the years my work's covered a good deal of the terrain above. My career in communications started, briefly, with journalism and then switched to campaigns around food and more specifically, vegetarianism. For six houmous-fueled years I was a campaigner and then campaigns director at the Vegetarian Society, convincing people the length and breadth of the land to dump meat products for ethical, environmental or health reasons.

It was while working at the Vegetarian Society that I realised that humour and not hectoring was slightly more effective in getting people to change their views or habits. This was a theme I'd return to many times over the next 15 years. Then I moved into working on sustainability and issues like climate change, and ten years ago set up Creative Concern, one of the UK’s first creative agencies dedicated to sustainability and social issues.

Today the Creative Concern portfolio of brands, media campaigns, films and digital projects covers a number of different and discrete areas of communication. Our team works on place promotion, community engagement, public information campaigns and, for a good deal of the time, on changing people's behaviour.

Our approach to behaviour change has a number of ‘rules’ or ‘themes’  which we apply and which we’ve shown to actually work over the last ten years. I’m going to run through some of those rules and then show a couple of campaigns where they’ve done the trick.

First of all, it’s really important to recognise that choices are emotional as much as they’re rational. This principle was established in probably one of the most famous ‘issues’ campaigns there’s ever been, the Crying Indian ad run by Keep America Beautiful in the early 70s. Iron Eyes Cody canoes up the Hudson River and then reaches landfall through a sea of litter. From the discarded drink cans and burger cartons the camera pans up to his face, down which a single tear runs. ‘People start pollution; people can stop it’ runs the voiceover. It set the standard and without the slightest hint of a ‘nudge’.

Next up is being ‘normal’. A change in behaviour has to be seen as something that regular folk can do rather than being solely the preserve of eco-vegan lefties like me. If naked cycling and body painting is your thing, for example, I think you’re very brave. I just doubt that as a campaign tactic it’s likely to get any potential new cyclists into the saddle.

The third rule we like to apply is social proofing and the notion that ‘everyone’s doing it’. We’ve shown this to work in our campaigns but one of the best and most persuasive examples is the ‘hotel towel experiment’ that was carried out by researchers at Chicago Business School and captured in their book ‘Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion’.

The research team worked with a local hotel and changed a proportion of the ‘Please re-use your towel’ signs in hotel bathrooms to read ‘The majority of people in this hotel tend to re-use their towels at least once during their stay’. Towel re-use went up by 26% in the rooms with the amended labels in. What’s even more fascinating is that when they changed them again to read ‘People in this room...’ the rate of re-use went up even higher, to 33% above the normal rate.

I don’t think this shows a ‘herd’ mentality at work, but more the idea that as a society we are contractarians, who will shift our behaviours if we think others are doing it too. As the Institute for Public Policy Research once put it, it’s about ‘I will if you will’.

Pride is another rule. Whether that’s pride of place or pride in your group, tribe or organisation, if you can attach pride to an appeal for change, you’ve got a better chance of success. A great example here is the ‘Don’t Mess With Texas’ campaign. Run by the Texas Department for Transport it boasted some great copy lines: “If Texas was your mother, would you still litter?” Great work. The campaign reduced litter on Texan highways by 72% between 1986 and 1990.

Framing comes in next. The way you frame your pitch makes all the difference. In politics for example, framing the dismantling of massive parts of the public sector as ‘Big Society’ is a remarkably canny bit of framing. How you position your message in relation to the frame of reference of your audience is absolutely critical and politics is a great place to watch this play out. Are we ‘building sustainable communities’ or tackling ‘Broken Britain’? Depends on your frame.

Number six is fun. Famously the Fun Theory in Sweden has turned stairs into piano keys and litter bins into bottomless pits. Their latest wheeze is a Speed Camera Lottery where the fines from cars breaking the speed limit at one Stockholm intersection are entered into a lottery for those cars snapped going under the speed limit. They cut average speeds by over 20%. Fun is massively important, as is humour.

Rule seven is to take risks. Creative communications is a crowded marketplace. Every day you are deluged by thousands of messages that are both commercial and non-commercial. The average edition of the New York Times has more information in it than you would have received during an entire lifetime in the Seventeenth Century a data overload that Richard Saul Wurman documented powerfully in Information Anxiety.

Our heads are mashed with messages and we’re also a powerfully distracted species. Britain’s most popular Google search terms in 2011 were ‘Royal Wedding’, ‘iPhone5’ and ‘Fifa’. Also in the top ten were ‘Groupon’, ‘Adele’ and the terrifying ‘Rebecca Black’. For every person searching for ‘sustainability’ there are 51 looking for cheap flights or, inevitably, 152 furtling around looking for porn.

The combination of data deluge plus dubious distraction means that any ethical or behavioural change campaign needs to take a few creative risks to break through and grab some attention.

My final rule is to know your audience and understand what you’re asking them to do. I’m by nature a massive optimist and so one thing that gives me great hope is the fact that we’re not all evil wankers. Here’s some proof. If you look at models of altruism versus outright greed, there are a number of ways to break society down into groups. For example there’s a model based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that looks at pioneers, prospectors and settlers who exhibit varying levels of ethical behaviour, but at its most basic level around 10% of us are altruistic from the outset, while 25% are in the Clarkson camp of unabashed selfishness and 65% sit in a big, slightly dozy ‘consensual’ zone in the middle. In terms of behaviour change I like to think of these as ‘Would love to’, ‘Not on your nelly’ and ‘I will if you will’.

The critical thing in terms of audience understanding and pitch is that if you pitch something purely at the 10% you’re doomed to failure; if you get into a shouting match with the selfish bastards your similarly doomed; successful campaigns need to aim at the mass market, consensual majority and coax them into our altruistic camp.

And the fascinating thing is that even the selfish quarter will come onside once a consensus is established, they’d be too ashamed to do otherwise.

So that’s the theory. How does it work? There are few examples from our work.

First of all I’d like to cover humour. Since I first realised that scaring people with secret filming from inside abattoirs wasn’t the only way to convince them to go vegetarian, I’ve always thought a good gag goes down really well. It has the added benefit of showing that you don’t take yourself too seriously and that adopting your proposed change in behaviour will not render you as humourless as Tomás de Torquemada on a bad hair day.

My back catalogue here basically consists of rude vegetables. It’s not complicated; a small study came out showing that vegetarians had slightly more rigorous and rewarding sex lives until a slightly older age and quicker than you can say ‘tofu is the new viagra’ an ad campaign was born. Once I’d finished getting an artworker to add veins to a courgette we were away. Resulted in blanket media coverage, an hourly plug on Channel 4’s Big Breakfast and I had to appear on a strange sex plus lottery numbers show on Kelvin McKenzie’s LIVE TV Channel.

Fast forward to today and here’s an ad campaign we ran with Friends of the Earth across Manchester which even now gets referenced as one of the best of its kind. Cycling is up across the city by at least 10%, not all down to this ad, but it’s safe to say that the humourous tone increased the ad’s reach massively.

And humour led us to team up with a californian animator to create a campaign called ‘Get Me Toasty’ for energy efficiency and home insulation. Creating a giant, walking but not talking piece of toast has helped us recast home insulation as something you’d actually walk across the street to find out more about. So far the campaign’s generated 15,000 enquiries for free or low cost insulation, cutting loads of winter fuel bills and cutting carbon emissions right across Greater Manchester.

Social proofing was at the forefront of our mind as we crafted a campaign for the borough of Wrexham called ‘People Power’. We led with images of ordinary folk from Wrexham who were willing to take a small step - a pledge - to reduce their carbon emissions as the Council committed to massively cut their emissions too. The entire focus was on a shared effort and shared benefit. Across the Council alone they saw energy bills drop by 7% during the campaign period, saving around £25,000. The Wrexham campaign built on an earlier, pledge-based campaign we did across Greater Manchester called ‘Manchester is my Planet’ which again combined social proofing with small steps and in this case, civic pride, to recruit carbon pledges. Over 20,000 people signed up over the lifetime of the campaign.

My next example is a simple but effective example of reframing a proposition. The Northwest’s Fostering Forum asked us to run a campaign across television, radio and print to generate applications to become foster carers. We ran some research groups and discovered that the problem wasn’t feeling compassionate about kids that needed homes, the problem was that most people didn’t feel that they could be a foster parent, that somehow they wouldn’t fit the profile. So we ran a fostering campaign with no children in, just lots of real life fosterers from as many walks of life as possible, telling you that ‘You Can Foster’. The campaign overshot its target by 100% and over 3,000 applied to become foster carers.

My last example is less about behaviour change and more about the power of communications to build pride and belief in a community. We’ve been running a campaign for the last four years in a large area of Manchester called Wythenshawe. It’s an area that has plenty of social challenges but that also has loads going for it. For years it had been done down in the mass media as a class A example of ‘Broken Britain’. Our Real Lives Wythenshawe campaign, which includes a network of 100 community ambassadors, has reclaimed the news agenda and allowed the people of the area to build a more positive image of their area. In our finest hour, we organised mass activity in response to an ill-thought documentary by Sarah Ferguson called the ‘Duchess on the Estate’, which depicted the very worst that they could find in Wythenshawe.

Our campaign fought back and won national, widespread coverage as a result.

The examples above are just behavioural change but our team at Creative Concern have built place brands, run fundraising campaigns, launched wildlife reserves and communicated with the public around renewable energy schemes. We think this is the real work of creative communications, of the new communications.

If you ignore for a moment the fact that every second 28,000 people are searching the internet for porn, human communications, is a wonderful, diverse and powerful part of who we are and what we could become in the future. It takes in education, our individual passions and ideals, our connections with family and friends, our work and our playtime. Communications is a critical part of us, as individuals and as a society.

It’s not about selling, it’s about something bigger.

It’s about great people and good ideas. It’s about enlightenment. It’s about making people smile and its about making lives better.

This is the real world of communications and its my contention that in an age where austerity is still biting and where there may actually be no return to the days of rampant and unbridled consumerism, this kind of communications, for social good, will in fact be the norm in the months and years ahead.

This, for me is the future, and it’s the business that we’re in.

The ten keys to responsible communication

At Creative Concern we've been busy setting up a European network of like-minded agencies called 'Do Not Smile'; we've got good friends and colleagues now in Paris, Bonn and Brussels and we're actively scoping out more creative agencies with a penchant for sustainability so that we can swell our ranks even further.

As well as sharing ideas and insights, the network means we can collaboratively pitch for international accounts knowing that we have the reach needed to work alongside the bigger multinational agencies.

Anyway - to the point of this posting. I wanted to share one of the many useful nuggets of learning that I've gleaned from our continental friends: the notion of responsible communications. Established by a book of the same name and by a set of guidelines adopted by the French Advertisers Association, responsible communications is all about honesty, transparency and an end to 'greenwashing' particularly on the part of larger, more polluting corporations.

There are ten keys to the concept, scribble them down and apply them next time you're planning a campaign:

1. Make sure that the represented behaviour is responsible and ethical.
2. Use an appropriate register and do not exaggerate.
3. Be honest.
4. Use arguments that are placed in contact and reflect reality.
5. Use vocabulary that is clear, precise and easy to understand.
6. Provide sufficient, transparent and easy-to-access information.
7. Make sure that what you say is based on reliable, verifiable data.
8. Use creative/design elements that have a direct, logical connection with the reality being discussed.
9. Follow the riles of rising logos, acronyms, symbols, trademarks and labels.
10. Involve service providers such as agencies, copywriters and photographers.

So there you have it... ten steps to more ethical, responsible communications.

The eleventh step? Well you could always join our network.

(With thanks to Gildas and the comrades at Sidiese.)

Greater Manchester signs off 48% carbon target

Imagine that - kicking off a blog posting with a headline that references percentages, targets and an admin process for signing off a strategy; stay awake at the back there!

It's pretty fundamental this one; Britain's second city (Greater Manchester to you and I) has signed off a climate change strategy that sets a pretty ambitious target of 48% carbon reductions by 2020 against a baseline level of 1990.

It doesn't stop there. The strategy covers all the bases, including mitigation, adaptation, green jobs and the need for a cultural shift (low carbon hegemony anyone?). The other cheeky bit lurking under the tarpaulin is an emerging measure for the thrillingly entitled 'Scope 3' emissions. To anyone who doesn't doze off at night with a copy of 'advanced carbon footprinting' clutched to their bosom, these are the emissions that we usually try and ignore: the stuff we buy, the flights we take, the food we eat.

Here's the first glimpse of our 'consumption-based' carbon footprint

The strategy as presented to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority can be downloaded from here. It's still in a stripped down, word-processed, no-frills format, but is well worth having a gander at. The headlines, in essence, are:

 - A rapid transition to a low carbon economy

 - Collective carbon emissions reduced by 48%

 - Be prepared for and actively adapting to a rapidly changing climate

 - ‘Carbon literacy’ will have become embedded into the culture of organisations, lifestyles and behaviours

There's some progress already, with a number of low carbon buildings, a domestic retrofit programme, emerging heat network plans, a green deal project and the introduction of an electric car charging scheme already well underway, but it's only the start.

The other issue for me is that it is a solid step towards getting all ten Greater Manchester authorities onto the same track on climate change. I chair the steering group for Manchester's own plan - 'A Certain Future' - and I know that we could achieve so much more if we all worked together, better, to cut carbon and adapt for the changes that lie ahead.

Headlands to headspace

Earlier this year we (Creative Concern) were lucky enough to work with the Morecambe Bay Partnership and our good friend and collaborator James Rebanks on the Partnership's Heritage Lottery Fund bid 'Headlands to Headspace'. Today it's been officially announced that they've won the bid and have been allocated £2 million through the Landscape Partnership programme.

The aim of the scheme is to help local people come together and maximise the opportunity offered by the inspiring views, landscape features, heritage and wildlife of the Bay. This will include projects to celebrate the Bay's unique cultural heritage and stunning landscapes, restore and reconnect wildlife habitats, protect the tidal islands, develop the railway stations as hubs to access key sites and support support education projects and oral history looking at the traditions of fishing in the Bay.

It's this last bit - the area's social history - that unearthed a real gem for me, an old bit of documentary footage of shrimpers roaring across the Bay in the 1930s, their carts (and horses) at some points almost completely engulfed by the sea; amazing.

Morecambe Bay is rich in heritage of this sort, but it's got a slightly left field side to it too. There's something about the patterns of the sand, the windswept trees, the slightly unexpected art projects and the toppled, incongruous gun emplacements that makes the whole package totally distinctive. The best bet is to get up there and check it out for yourself, starting with a cocktail in the Midland Hotel would be a good idea.

Humphrey Head by Jon Sparks

Finally, the Headlands to Headspace project wouldn't have come off unless it had been steered by the awesome force of nature that is the Partnership's co-ordinator, Susannah Bleakley, or if it hadn't been given a glorious shove by the likes of the Mersey Basin Campaign, Regional Parks Exchange and the Northwest Regional Development Agency.

It's projects like this that should remind us that when it comes to big, connected and beautiful landscapes, regions work; someone might like to mention this to Mr Pickles.

Manchester's Vertical Farm

Goodness me it's been hard keeping this one quiet. We've been very, very lucky at Creative Concern HQ to be working with the Manchester International Festival on a proposed vertical farm, right here in Manchester, housed within a transformed office block.

We've worked on the feasibility with sustainable food expert Debbie Ellen, Capital Relations and, naturally, our brilliant friends at Urbed.

More details eventually... but for now, here's Urbed's visual schematic as a 'taster' and I suggest you all book your tickets for the awesome Dickson Despommier!

iManc*

NOTE: email digitalmap@marketingmanchester.com if you think you should be on our next map of Online Manchester!
__

There’s an urban myth about Manchester and computers that I am utterly beguiled by.

It goes like this.

Alan Turing, University of Manchester academic, father of modern computing and closet homosexual took his own life in 1954.

The myth has it that the cyanide he used was in an apple, which was then left, with a bite taken out of it, on the stand next to his death bed.

Fast forward to the late 70s and Steves Jobs and Wozniac are busy in a garage, building what will become the Apple computer. They need a logo for the company. After an early flirtation with an Isaac Newton cartoon they go for an apple, with a bite taken out of it.

And there you have it. Apple’s homage to Turing as they half-knowingly created a leading global brand of the future, complete with a hardline back to the original modern city of Manchester.

None of which is true of course, but as memetic messages go, it’s one that spreads the second you tell it. It’s irresistible, I hereby dare you not to mention it to someone.

I like to think it is true, in fact I insist it is, as I love to see my favoured brands united in some way. Manchester plus Apple is a kind of dream combo for me; if I could see brand collisions of Monocle Magazine and Paul’s Tofu, or maybe Bourgeois Boheme and Rapha, I’d be a very, very happy man.

But back to memetics.

How ‘stuff spreads’ is on my mind as I ponder the next phase of our work on Manchester’s digital map. Last year we researched, and then depicted on an interactive map, a cross-section of the websites and blogs that collectively make up our city’s online presence – our pixelated tendrils if you will.

We did the research, created the map, and now we’re asking an elite cadre of bloggers and tweet-happy social media types to comment on the notion of ‘online presence’ and more specifically, tell us and Marketing Manchester, our client, where the project should go next. 

It seemed the right way to go about it really. It means we want you, dear reader, to tell us what YOU think.

In the process we’d like to uncover some more things we didn’t know about Manchester online, generate some insights into how cities should approach their digital ‘brand’ experience, and maybe we’ll even see some more urban myths, spreading out through the ether, next up from me, the one about how Manchester invented dance music.

*As well as the title of this blog entry, this is also the slogan emblazoned on the best selling T-Shirt at Manchester Airport. You can buy one here.

Postscript: Makes you proud to be a BritGeek. In September of last year, following a frenzied campaign on the Internet, the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown  issued a public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

The Museum in 2030

We've been working with our friend and collaborator Alex Saint on a series of 'insights' for the North West Federation of Museums and Galleries - the NW Fed to its friends. The idea behind the pieces we've pulled together is to stimulate some radical thinking and give hundreds of institutions across the region the tools, ideas and approaches that will help them thrive in these challenging times. There's also an emerging LinkedIn discussion which is worth checking out.

Here's one of the pieces I wrote, in this case, it's a view to the museum of the future:

Rethinking the Museum

The successful museum in 2030 will be a place that unites; that engages; that takes the continued wonder of the original object and fuses it with shared stories and distributed histories. The transformation will have been powered by new partnerships, business innovation and a keen, clear eye on the shifting shape of society.
At the same time some of the museums we know and love today will be distant memories, their collections dispersed and their buildings transformed into centres of new activity: work/live units for micro-creatives; crash pads for funky seniors; urban food hubs; or incubation facilities for nanotech start-ups.

The notion that ‘not all will survive’ is as liberating as it is threatening. Think back just ten years and you will be able to think of organisations or institutions that are no longer a feature on our cultural landscape, or of new ones that have flourished. Change happens, and the shift in the next 20 years will be one where the innovators, the resourceful and the valued have thrived and survived. Those resistant to change will not have fared so well.

Making culture pay

At the most basic level, there will be a fiscal revolution in the two decades to come. There will be new ways to make culture ‘pay’. Smart cards for travel networks in our urban centres will also be used to extract voluntary (but relatively ubiquitous) entrance fees for arts and cultural venues such as museums; they will also log our preferences and help us, through enhanced social media, to discover new experiences in an age where experience carries a higher value to our citizens than consumer goods.

It won’t stop there though. Successful museums will have learnt how to save money and make money, to enable them to continue to deliver unique and invaluable public services. This will have been achieved, not least, through a zero carbon, zero waste revolution. Monetisation of the museum will be key. They will be true social enterprises, that offer paid for services, have a healthy network of volunteers or ‘members’ and have become more adept than ever at exploiting the philanthropy of those with ‘significant net personal worth’. They will be commissioned for services from a network of public and private ‘client’ groups; and they will be past masters at leveraging the value of their brand.

The bricks and mortar of museums will have changed in 2030, but our architectural landscape will not have shifted so dramatically; it always worth remembering that 80% of today’s buildings will – barring cataclysms - be still standing in fifty years’ time; what’s in those buildings is another matter.

There will, in 2030, be more of a barter and exchange going on in terms of collections – think of the PlusTate programme, which through a sharing of resources currently supports the development of the visual arts right across Britain, but taken to a whole new level. These exchanges will have a ‘showbiz’ value for visitors and will be as much about the shared brand equity of the big name museums, with ‘on show now from the V&A’ becoming a common line to see on promotional material.

This starts to break down the notion of museum as collection and shifts to the notion of museum as experiential brand. Across the next 20 years many would expect digitisation and virtual reality (remember that?) to challenge ever harder the primacy of the physical experience of collections but that will not come to pass; 3D printing will not create a ‘museum of museums’ in every town. What will happen is that collections are rationalised and in many cases thinned out; some may be given away to the community in return for social memories or histories that bring life to the ubiquitous mangle, butter churn or ZX81.

These stories will be captured, shared and in this way museums will not simply continue to be features of current and future social media networks (...‘Let’s have a Facebook page’ will no longer be the limit of their ‘Web 2.0 strategy’) but will actually become a new social media network, themselves, making connections, gathering their cultural tribe and offering a powerful mechanism for self expression.

Trust, democracy and a 'third space'

As a renewed and vibrant network, museums will increasing be genuine centres of democratic dialogue, interrogating the issues of the moment. From conflict resolution, to reproductive rights or the fight against climate change, the interpretation of collections will increasingly encounter and embrace the zeitgeist and be far more relevant as a result.

Part of this new buzz around museums will be established on a notion of ‘trust’. More than anywhere else they will be places and spaces in the future that people want to connect with because they are trusted and known as passionate, informed, but fair communicators of histories and ideas that matter; they are also the zone within which we increasingly choose to contemplate, relax, or make the bigger decisions in life. In 2030 we will be even more harried than today by bleeping texts, ringtones and the tsunami of email. Richard Wurman called it ‘Information Anxiety’ and he was on the mark. Museums will offer us, in the future, a respite from the everyday; they will be the space we need.

And they will be well established by then in this new mode of operation. What the next twenty years will provide is the added perspective, post ‘age of anxiety’, that reveals the powerful effect of major investments around the turn of the millennium. There will be no such dramatic investments in our run through to 2030, in fact the next twenty years will be all about making those historical investments work, and work hard.

This work will be undertaken together. There will still be a North West Federation of Museums, indeed there will still be a North West of England, in twenty years time. What feels in 2010 like a complete reshaping of our political and cultural landscape post-recession will seem less pronounced in 2030, although museums as a sector will have helped many people, not least through their strong sense of social purpose, to ‘get through the worst of it’.

Museums will be a sector in 2030. There will be a collective. From new business models to artefact exchanges or the creation of a new ‘social media’ of museums, all the key trends for the sector will rely heavily on the sector working collaboratively and in partnership. Core museums will learn from nationals, and vice versa; local museums will boast a new charitable trust status, independent from their local authorities, benefitting from  mutuality and enterprise. The new ‘pop-up’ museums of the 2020s will, in particular, be an unexpected and challenging addition, not least because they make the effort to stay open, just that little bit later.

The Great Transition

The networks and sharing that hold the sector together will become more pronounced in the future. There will be a regional ‘currency’ of museums that helps them share with each other collections, staff and expertise; there will be a skills bank that all can access to raise their collective game; and there will be a shared infrastructure that is physical, digital and human.

The great transition ahead will challenge us all. Vision and leadership will be prerequisites. The people who will steer the sector into this future will have to be networked, resourceful and ready to embrace change. They will have recognised and risen to the need to be true civic leaders, with a mandate to provide the places and experiences which we will all access in some way.

And that uplift in ‘taking part’ will be critical. Currently fewer than half of all adults visit a gallery or museum each year – in 2030, if we have succeeded in transforming our sector, there will be much higher levels of engagement.

Today there are 290 museums and galleries across England’s North West. In 2030 there will be fewer than this and they will be stronger, more resilient and more productive than today, if collaboration and innovation is pursued, as a collective goal.

A final view into the future, then, should spell out more clearly what some of those shared goals might be. What’s clear is that the sector will have a critical role in unlocking minds, educating and engaging the public. Within our time horizon of 2030 there will be a ‘double hit’ for example when you consider the region’s social capital (or skilled people, to you and I). The demand for low-skilled jobs will drop dramatically as our economy continues to shift up the value chain towards industries based around intellectual property and key sectors such as low carbon goods and services. At the same time we have a worrying skills ‘bubble’ in the pipeline, with half of our current workforce not making it past A-levels at present. Museums can and should be in the frontline of creating a new culture of learning that ensures we are not left behind in the skills race. The challenge today, with an eye on 2030, will be for museums to identify the topics and areas that are important, economically, which they can explore and bring to life for students young and old; here they should connect with local partners who are driving economic strategy and forecasting.

Museums will also have a shared goal of keeping our minds ticking over. The fastest growing audiences in the next twenty years will be the over 60s, as our society grows significantly older and greyer. This is a critical mission, particularly where museums can overcome isolation, connect with social histories that will stimulate memories, and respond pro-actively to the notion of new skills and new employment for people in their ‘third age’.

Museums can (help to) save the world

There is a third, almost didactic role for museums, working collectively, and that is to be part of efforts to create a genuinely sustainable future. As centres of experience rather than consumerism, museums immediately offer an alternative to the ‘consume at all costs’ culture that has successfully damaged or destroyed 60% of our planet’s ecosystems. Beyond this role, they can also access the ‘headspace’ within which we need a dramatic shift in thinking and values; technical ‘fixes’ for climate change for example are already reaching the limits of their application as we realise that it is behavioural change and our shared culture that will be pivotal in handing a habitable planet over to future generations. By 2050 we need to have reduced our carbon emissions by a phenomenal 80% or more, and this requires a complete change in the way we view the world.

It’s a change that museums can help to deliver. Sustainability messages sold as drab calls to constrain consumption, use less and lower your expectations have been failing spectacularly for a generation or more; museums can bring delight, intrigue and play to this mission, in many ways they are perfectly placed for it.

This final notion of creating delight is an apt place to end an exploration of 2030. Today many are focused on survival, both within the museum sector and beyond, but across a longer time frame there is an opportunity to create universal delight that make places more characterful, that makes minds more inquisitive and makes communities stronger. One recent study revealed that the use of social networks like Twitter possibly releases the brain hormone ‘oxytocin’, also known as the ‘cuddle’ chemical that makes people feel trust, security, less anxiety and possibly even turned on. It’s all about connecting with people, and interacting, in a delightful way. If museums are a social network of the future then they need to set their sights too on the cuddle chemical as their central indicator of success; or as they call it in Tameside, generating more ‘moments of magic’ through museums.

This is the future. It is ours to create.

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NB. Thanks to NW Fed for a great project - and also to Renaissance North West, MLA and National Museums Liverpool for making it happen. Also am heavily indebted to the awesome work done by the Center for the Future of Museums in the USA and has some valuable input from Stephen Feber.

Get me toasty

Today we (Creative Concern, as opposed to the wider human race) helped to launch a campaign to get homes across Greater Manchester warm and toasty. The client is AGMA, the Energy Savings Trust and the 10 local authorities. The scheme provides grants for basic insulation measures in your home if you live in Greater Manchester and it's genuinely unbeatable:

• Free no obligation energy survey by an accredited assessor
• Home insulation improvements for as little as £50
• Free cavity wall and loft insulation if you are over 60 OR on eligible benefits OR pregnant OR have a child under 6 

Full details are on the website we've built for them - http://www.getmetoasty.com - and as I type, my colleagues are racing around with our giant 'Mr Toast' character, preparing the radio ads and getting ready for two weekends of fun and frolics in the Trafford Centre and Arndale. Marvellous stuff.

And my favourite part of the campaign so far? Hooking up with the awesome, LA-based creator of 'Mr Toast' who is our collaborator on this project.

Ten most watched in 2010

Am officially blown away by the fact the vigil we helped to PR at the John Lennon Peace Monument in Liverpool has appeared in China Daily as one of the ten most watched in 2010. Move over Wiki Leaks, Palin and Putin! The full story is here.

More on world-saving museums

I was at the Maritime Museum in London yesterday giving a revved up version of my 'Can Museums Save the World' presentation which I blogged about a few weeks back; after suffering a train cancellation and moderate level ticket barrier carnage at Euston, I got there a wee bit late but in time to deliver my pitch. A fascinating group of senior people from National museums had been assembled, and all had a keen eye on what the future may hold for their institutions.

Much of my pitch is about sustainability, but blended with a bit of futurology. The basic question is: What will museums be like in 20, 30 or 40 years time if they are truly sustainable? Will they be embedded in their communities, treading lightly on the planet and financially thriving?

In terms of the futurology slice of my pitch pie, I've leant heavily on some superb work being done by the Center for the Future of Museums in the United States. They've produced a superb paper on what 2034 might look like for the museums sector, and for the California Association of Museums they've pulled together a full 'futures' resource guide complete with five 25 year scenarios, suggested worksheets and some guidelines on how to hold  a futures-focused session in your own organisation or network.

The sustainability part of my pitch however, is all the product of my own chunterings over the last couple of years. I genuinely see the world I know well (sustainability) and the world I am getting to know better (culture) as natural collaborators, if not wholly intertwined players in creating a better future. These two gorgeous worlds, bastions of progressive thinking, are of course arrayed against a third universe of infamy: the world that thinks economic growth and perpetual materialism are the only things that make life worth living.

Anyway so here are the key points:

1. Happiness and wealth fell out with each other more than half a century ago.
2. We need to ‘reboot’ economics and find a way to achieve prosperity without growth.
3. Non-materialist forms of social capital and experience are part of the solution.
4. Culture and the experience economy can win us back from materialism.
5. Reaching people, and fighting for headspace, is a core strength of the cultural sector.
6. Culture creates the places and spaces that people want to be in, fostering a more compelling and competitive identity.
7. Innovation must no longer be the preserve of consumerist ‘novelty’ and desire but has to become part of how we craft our collective future.

Therefore, it's clear to me, that culture can (help to) save the world. Not least because just like the sphere of creative communications (design, media, advertising, film etc) that Creative Concern operates in, culture is an antidote to the idea that it is all about selling shit to sleepwalkers. I use this quote from Raymond Williams' 1962 book, Communications:

Our commonest economic error is the assumption that production and trade are our only practical activities, and that they require no other human justification or scrutiny. 

We need to say what many of us know in experience: that the life of man, and the business of society, cannot be confined to these ends; that the struggle to learn, to describe, to understand, to educate is a central and necessary part of our humanity.

I know to many, particularly in the current climate, the notion that economic growth is a futile and unsustainable pursuit probably comes across as a piece of sideshow prattling; but it is those that still pursue this ultimately self-defeating course of 'growth at all costs' that are, to use the vernacular, 'off their rockers'.

Another quote I like is from Edward Abbey:

"Growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell."

Enough said.

Peace and love, Liverpool style

The world's media at the launch of the European Peace Monument

It was a busy weekend for the Creative Concern PR team. On Saturday (9th) we handled the global PR launch of a European Peace Monument gifted to Liverpool by the Global Peace Initiative (and created by artist Lauren Voiers) on what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday. We were commissioned by Liverpool’s Beatles Story attraction and also worked with the City, and with Liverpool One.


The event centred around the 18ft monument which was unveiled by Julian and Cynthia Lennon in the city’s deeply lovely Chavasse Park (one of my favourite bits of new green infrastructure across the region). The launch was attended by dignitaries from all over Europe and captured by the world’s media.

Unveiled live worldwide on BBC News 24 and Sky News the broadcast was syndicated nationally by CBS in the USA for live transmission on the popular ‘The Early Show’ reaching a global audience of millions. NBC in the USA, Russia’s NTV channel, Japan’s KGL, China’s CNC, Germany ZDF and Italy’s RAI attended creating packages of interviews from the live event.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MqYBSTR-Ps

In addition the story and images received blanket coverage around the world in print media from The Sunday Times and News of the World through to USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. The team here at Creative Concern also engaged directly with a global audience through social media.

I don't often do blatant trumpet blowing on this blog, but I'm dead chuffed by this one, and by the efforts of our super, fabulous and quietly dapper media team.

Also chuffed that it's all about... peace.

What is Creative Concern?

I've recently been called upon to explain myself. Quite right too. Embedded below is a trolley dash through the chaos that is my head. It starts with a bit about why and how we do what we do at Creative Concern, before moving onto some of our bits of work 'out there' in the real world that we love so much.

As is ever the case, it's an evolving pitch so if there are any bits that could do with improvement, please send your thoughts in now on the back of stamped addressed envelope.

What is creative_concern?

View more presentations from Creative Concern.

Mersey Forest takes to the sky...

Had to share this one - a really cute story. We staged a press launch and photocall last week at the Mab Lane Community Woodland for the Mersey Forest and Forestry Commission. My colleagues were there at the break of dawn, inflating (biodegradable) balloons with tags attached full of wildflower seeds.

It was the one and only rainy morning of the week, predictably, but even so more than 30 children from St Brigids, St Albert’s RC and Mab Lane Primary School released the biodegradable balloons filled with wild flower seeds into the air to help plant vibrant patches of wild flowers right across the region and beyond.

The exciting thing came when this appeared on the woodland's blog site:

"I’m a teacher at Highfield Hall Primary School in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. One of the Nursey children I was teaching bought a big bunch of colourful balloons in, having found them on her way to school. The children are going to be planting them on Monday. The Nursery children were very excited and interseted in the story behind the balloons and can’t wait to plant the seeds. What a lovely idea!!"

So our balloons flew up into a soggy sky and made it 66 miles at least. Totally lovely.

The event was staged to mark the completion of the planting of 20,000 new trees to create the Mab Lane Community Woodland on two former brown field sites in West Derby as part of The Mersey Forest.

Winning with ENWORKS

Dead chuffed that we've won the contract to deliver communications support to the marvellous people at ENWORKS, the Northwest’s award-winning environmental business support service.

After pitching against a bunch of other agencies (there's some serious and talented competition out there by the way) we've won the three-year contract to help improve the competitiveness and productivity of Northwest businesses by building ENWORKS’ profile, regionally and further afield.

We've been lucky enough to work with ENWORKS before, as they've been going strong since 2001, and have helped more than 10,000 companies to date. ENWORKS is now a leading authority on environmental business issues, providing free support for businesses to become more profitable by reducing their use of CO2, water and materials.

Anyway we think they're fab and it's great to be working with them again. The YouTube clip above is an example of one of our previous campaigns for them, which did not involve harm or injury coming to the businessman involved. Honest.

There is an alternative

We've just released our film for Cooperative Fortnight called 'There is an alternative'. We had luminaries from a host of cooperatives come into the studio for the shoot, and I'm dead chuffed with the outcome.

Hide and seek, at Brockholes

We recently finished a new brand for the exciting ‘Brockholes’ project, a Lancashire Wildlife Trust plan to create a new £8.6 million nature reserve and visitor centre on the site of a former gravel works just outside Preston. The project is being funded, to a large degree, by the Newlands programme which we’ve worked on for a number of years now for the Forestry Commission and NWDA.

We’re proud of our work on Brockholes - led by our senior designer Helen Thomas. It’s a pretty extensive brand work-up, stretching through to retail, interpretation, ‘play’ and the tone of voice of the people that will meet and greet when you visit the 106 hectare complex from Spring 2011.

We’ve liaised closely with the architect Adam Khan whose ‘Floating World’ design is genuinely inspirational and we’ve done loads of research, both on comparator brands and the brandscape, as well as focus groups with the target audiences for this ‘unreserved reserve’.

We’ve opted for a monochrome palette to reflect the Wildlife Trust brand and the word Brockholes is supported by a lexicon of spot words, which show some of the fun things you can do. The whole thing comes together as if visitors themselves had been involved in the creation of the site; as if they doodled Brockholes up out of the disused quarry next to the M6. This will be extended, we hope, to invitations to interact across the site, with black and white internal walls that come to represent giant blackboards – with fun headlines supplemented by chalk or charcoal so that adults and children alike can leave their mark.

Communication responsables...

I was in Brussels this week, for a pitch on sustainable transport, EU partnerships and the need to hammer down carbon emissions in the public transport sector. We should be in with a shout: the project is communications support for a number of partner cities (including Manchester) and our consortium was made up of a unique network of agencies specialising in sustainable or green communications.

There's always a chance that some monolithic, multinational, boring, über-agency will stomp in and promise the world, but our network of creative, smaller agencies with a strong record on transport and the environment, has to be a winner.

Other than the chance of winning the project, the collaboration has been really useful for swapping notes with other people who 'do what we do' in other countries. Here in the UK, I would only really cite Futerra as a fellow traveller of ours, so it's brilliant to discover like minds in Europe. The two other agencies at the pitch were Yuluka in Brussels (who brilliantly pulled together the partnership) and Sidièse in Paris. Both fab, both with ideas and approaches to share.

We're thinking about formalising our network into something more high profile, structured around the notion of 'communication responsables', a French-born approach to sustainable communications which I'm busy learning about and which it would do no harm to bring to a wider audience in the UK. Core principles include transparency and honesty; it also appears to be a direct attempt to block ever higher levels of greenwash on the part of major corporates. More anon.

Covering up for the Whitworth

The new wallpaper exhibition at the Whitworth - Walls Are Talking - launches in February and our team at Creative Concern have been hard at work designing the promo campaign for the show, which we’re really proud of.

Walls Are Talking is the first exhibition of its kind in the UK, featuring wallpapers by more than 30 internationally known artists including Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Niki de St. Phalle. Already well known for its wallpaper collection, the Whitworth is pulling together a genuinely challenging show and we knew that the campaign to promote it had to be every bit as edgy.

We worked with the City’s Creative Director, Peter Saville and photographer Graeme Cooper to produce the artwork, which directly responds to some of the core themes that the exhibition explores: subversion, sexuality and imprisonment.

The image (see above) features a portrait shown from below the eyes. It is an anonymous face with the mouth torn away revealing a layer of wallpaper. We wanted to capture the concept of the exhibition which is the idea of something passive taking over; ‘if only the walls could talk’.

Wallpaper was on my mind over Christmas actually, when I listened again to Stephen Fry’s ‘blessay’ on aesthetics and Oscar Wilde. In the podcast he recounts the time when Wilde was asked his view of the United States, famously responding that the reason that the US was such a violent, brutal place was because its wallpaper was so ugly.

As Stephen Fry then draws out, this is typical wildean flippancy at first hearing but actually stems from a deep belief in aesthetics and, critically, in the aesthetics of the everyday. It is the notion that if we care about design and quality and beauty then it will lift the spirits, enrich the human condition, make the world a better place.

Which is one reason why I’ll be just as focused on the Whitworth’s huge collection of ‘everyday’ wallpapers spanning several centuries, as well as the pieces submitted by the big name artists. Good design, and beauty, is something we should encounter from the moment we wake until the moment we finally stop Twittering and nod off to sleep.

And everyday aesthetics - finally - takes me back to one of my great Whitworth moments. The gallery has always been one of my favourites spaces, for over 20 years now. When I was a student I was there often, and one day a huge school group arrived to fill in work sheets, make some drawings and chatter their way through the galleries. As they emerged into the space, confronted by the rich collection of work, one of the children looked down, not up, and belted out the most lovely refrain: “What a beautiful floor!”
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Walls Are Talking opens on February 6 and runs until May 3 and is collaboration with the V&A Museum. It includes specially commissioned work from artists Michael Craig-Martin and Catherine Bertola.

Manchester. A Certain Future.

Tonight we officially launched Manchester's new climate change action plan with the help of Ed Miliband, shortly before he disappeared off to Copenhagen.

Creative Concern worked with M Four and Manchester City Council on drafting the plan, editing the final text and we also built the plan's website.

We're very proud of the plan but even more proud of our city for signing up to some bold targets including the headline target of a 42% cut in CO2 emissions before 2020. Bold stuff, and as we wrote in the plan, if the world's first and definitive industrial city can get to grips with climate change then no city, anywhere else in the world, has any excuse to leave this issue in the tray marked 'too difficult'.

This Land is Our Land

At the Bluecoat in Liverpool today, we helped with the launch of 'Adapting the Landscape', a framework vision for a new, productive landscape fusing together the two city regions of Liverpool and Manchester. 

As well as producing some materials and a presentation for the event, Creative Concern was a key part of the project team, contributing to the new vision for a land that is home to 6 million people and an economy of £50 billion. The other members of the project team - led by URS Corporation - were WXY Studio in New York, West 8, Barnes Walker and the lovely people at Urban Practitioners. The project was funded - and steered - by the NWDA and the Regional Parks Xchange (where you can go to download the presentations from the event) as well as the Mersey Basin Campaign, Natural England, Homes and Communities Agency and Peel Holdings.

The ‘Adapting the Landscape’ research study is basically about using landscape, place and sustainability to help unlock even higher levels of prosperity, wellbeing and quality of life. It provides a framework for landscape adaptation and investment that can tackle climate change, support improvements in people’s quality of life and underpin economic growth. The framework we've come up with identifies the contribution that natural landscape resources can make to the future development of the Lower Mersey Basin, the area covered by this study. At the same time the approach provides a toolkit for identifying and prioritising investment that can be applied to any area.

The themes we explored through the project - initially as a set of future scenarios - included:

Mersey Bioregion
This is centred around a move towards a more self-sufficient, sustainable region with an emphasis on localism, renewable energy production, the growing of food and energy crops and a landscape well adapted to climate change.

Innovation Axis
Here, the key is to connect the city regions and major towns with stronger communications set in an area of attractive and marketable green infrastructure. There would be a focus on jobs and opportunities through the connection of knowledge centres and growth industries, including environmental technologies and services.

Mersey Playgrounds
This strand recognised the importance of high quality, accessible local environments where people can play, travel and work. Waterways will become destinations and leisure routes; flood alleviation measures will be used to create new landscapes and culture and art will be used to transform the visual experience of the region.

So what could be achieved? Some of the possibilities include:

Green the cities. Take the landscape of the Lower Mersey Basin into the heart of the cities with street trees and enhanced green infrastructure.

Embrace the waterfronts. Create and improve green access along the river and other waterways, stretching into the heart of the city regions and where possible, new water bodies.

Create a diverse landscape. Make the Mersey Bioregion the most dynamic, productive and biodiverse landscape through land art, farms and planting.

Manage a productive landscape. Produce energy from wind, tides, biomass and the sun.

Facilitate an accessible landscape. Establish a fine grain network of paths and bridges to accompany existing strategic arteries with an emphasis on localism.

Create a landscape for prosperity. Continue the Mersey’s history of innovation. In centres like Daresbury it is environmental technologies leading our way into a low carbon future.

Build a resilient and playful landscape. Utilise funding for flood defences to respond to flood risks and create iconic cultural landmarks, public space and new biodiverse habitats as part of ‘Mersey Playgrounds’.

Our next challenge is to build all of the above into the region's new Integrated Strategy (RS2010). Watch this space for more details.