Helsinqi Director's Blog

This blog has moved - New Helsinqi site live!

2010-06-22T11:01:00.000-07:00

The new Helsinqi site launched yesterday, and this blog now has new digs at:
www.helsinqi.com/archives/category/directors-blog

See you there!

CSR 2010: Sustainability is growing

2010-05-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

The 2010 Corporate Citizenship Report is out, and the big change is the increasing prominence of sustainability on the CSR agenda:

"Sustainability, the integration of people and planet into a company’s purpose, is on the radar for 73 percent of the respondents and becoming more important. This is interesting considering that 70 percent of the responding companies already have a sustainability program in place. Eighty-two percent of these programs are considered part of the corporate strategy."

More relevant links on this Fast Company post.

The art of nondeceiving deception

2010-05-05T15:20:00.000-07:00

What does Vik Muniz's genre of very meta, savvy, contemporary art have to do with advertising and marketing, specifically integrity marketing? Anywhere you're engaging a fruitful, thoughtful consideration of the tensions of image and substance, you're in relevant territory. Discuss.

> TED link

Fairness & Prosperity

2010-03-26T11:52:00.000-07:00

Thought-provoking study by Joseph Heinrich at UBC correlates fairness as a cultural phenomenon with market integration. Nice implications for the integrity marketing set in an increasingly integrated world.

The results back a cultural explanation of fairness—or, at least, of the variable levels of fairness found in different societies.... Notions of fairness increase steadily as societies achieve greater market integration (see chart).

> Read the Economist article.

More cracks in the monolith: Ads down; PR up

2010-02-25T12:40:00.000-08:00

Everywhere we look, the status of marketing is changing radically. Whether you see it as a catastrophic sinkhole opening up below, or a powerful groundswell buoying you up depends — as revolutions always do — on how vested your interests are in the entrenched (erstwhile) status quo versus your readiness to embrace dramatic change as an opportunity.

It may come down to where you stand on the advertising-to-PR spectrum, or, to put a finer point on it, the spectrum between old-school, monolithic, unilateral push-messaging and a participatory communications model which, in terms of antecedents, is closer to the PR model.

The Economist writes on the sanguineness of public relations in the recession:

According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.

— "Good News", 14 Jan 2010.

Interesting times. Of course, whenever things look like this, there are two ways to respond. Most will take (what appears to be) the swift and easy road, devising ever cleverer ways to game the new situation. (The Economist refers to "blow-dried blogs.") Pity, that. But I can't complain: it leaves swathes of market hungry for a fundamental change — and visionary enough to see the writing on the wall — wide open to those of us solidly committed to the integrity way.

Message misses by a continent

2010-02-13T18:31:00.000-08:00

In this clip from the French show Le petit journal on Canal+, host Yann Barthès lampoons a recent publicity video by President Nicolas Sarkozy's party, the UMP. Called « La France change » ("France is Changing"), the video shows an idyllic, happy France renewed by Sarko and his party, replete with happy ball-tossing families, solar houses, and cheerfully diverse schoolkids.

There's just one little problem with all that great Gallic goodness. As Barthès' team discovered, the UMP's happy France was shot on location — in the good old US of A. The ball that family is tossing is an American football, and the car driving behind them is sporting California plates. That solar house is in Escondido, the schoolkids are from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and the mom and daughter are hugging in Cambria, California.

Hey, why waste money hiring your own constituents to film the country that elected you, when you can make it all happen with stock footage courtesy of Getty Images? Now that's what I call centime wise and euro foolish.

Incidentally, I wonder how this proposed tax would have affected the UMP's stock footage budget…

Merci à Clélia Valat, pour m'envoyer ce clip!

Respect on the Porch

2010-02-01T13:41:00.000-08:00

In integrity marketing, all shortcuts are dead ends.

Recently a canvasser from a nonprofit activist group whose work I respect knocked on our front door. Never mind that we were finishing dinner; that's par for the course. The problem, as I politely pointed out, was the No Solicitors sign mounted front and center on our door.

Now, I'm a nice guy. I treat everybody with respect. Even those who don't see the wisdom of reciprocating. I didn't shout the guy off my porch, partly because I was curious as to how he would justify disregarding our sign. Yes, he had seen the sign, but he persisted, pointing out that we had supported them in the past, and was I aware of current Big Problem X and that now, more than ever, they needed my money, time, and any extra limbs I could spare?

The thing is, I'm also an independent-minded chap who does not take well to being sold (which doesn't make me rare). Solicitors on our porch have been doomed to leave empty-handed. Nine times out of ten that's because they're pushing a religion I don't need, including the Church of the Immaculate Vinyl Siding. The rest of the time, it's because I simply don't buy on impulse. The best a canvasser can hope for is that they will have made me aware of a cause that interests me enough to look further into it on my own time. I'll weigh it against the other myriad causes I believe in, and put my support where I decide it will have the most positive effect.

That takes a long view, but canvassers are focussed on the immediate win. Once in a while, in the primordial past, they might have gotten that win from me in the form of a one-time donation. It would have come at the cost of a big loss: my resentment at having allowed myself be coerced. That's a bad trade for everybody.

Rare is the canvasser who realizes that the more he pushes me, the more he loses me. So stupendously rare, in fact, that we quashed the whole charade and put up our No Solicitors sign. Now we eat dinner in peace without random people wasting our time and theirs.

Except in the case of Mr. Persistent. By dismissing our clearly expressed wish not to be solicited to at home, he apparently hoped to bully me into giving him his small win. Instead, I saw him off and then unsubscribed myself from the organization's email list — a big loss. May they enjoy great success. Without me.

There are thousands, probably millions of organizations doing work I believe in. It's a buyer's market. Any help reducing that number and tightening my focus is welcome. Any organization that tries to make an end run around the simple respect its supporters deserve — and plainly ask for — is making the process of elimination that much easier for me.

Topic for another day: this principle extends beyond the front porch and deep into an organization's messaging. Nonprofits are by no means above non-integrity marketing. While good organizations avoid deception per se, coercion and manipulation (read: guilt) are the typical default mode. It's easy to see why. It's important to understand why not.

Change Agents: mind the blind spot

2010-01-30T14:55:00.000-08:00

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives | Video on TED.com

The Transparency Race

2010-01-30T14:14:00.000-08:00

In this podcast, Ethical Corporation's Toby Webb and columnist Mallen Baker discuss CSR-ranking applications like GoodGuide, designed to give consumers a quick and easy way of choosing responsible, sustainable products.

The dream, of course, is of seamless point-of-sale transparency, which is great. The problem is the same old fundamental issue: CSR, sustainability, equitability — all these great matters are churning seas of rich, labile information that can't be squeezed into the poor vessel of a single score without sacrificing all the juice. Part of that juice is your own judgment, your own values.

In other words we shift the question of trust from the producer to a rating entity. A timeless issue, as old as the existence of advocacy groups and scoring schemes and questions about their motives and legitimacy. The pitfall of tech is that it speeds us past those questions ever more easily and conveniently.

The fundamental issue in the Transparency Race is that misinformation (e.g. greenwashing) uses the same bandwidth as real information. This principle is the recurring bane of all who would trumpet the utopian promise of a given tech shift. Sometimes, yes, the game changes. It doesn't get easier, or better. It gets different. Forward-thinkers will leverage the junctures, for good and for ill.

Is this a fatalistic view? By no means. It's a reminder. We need to look at technological and other infrastructural shifts soberly, with two things in mind:

The first and most essential is that where we can make progress — where we can evolve and improve our lives, individually and collectively — is in the human mind and the human heart. That's the prize to keep our eyes on.
The second is to remember not be seduced by the promises of tech, but to watch it avidly nonetheless, to seize the opportunities created in the shifts, so that we can leverage the junctures for good, in the service of item 1.

I'm thankful to groups and people like Ethical Corporation and Mallen Baker, among myriad others, as that's the work they're doing. It reminds us that it's a Transparency Race — an Integrity Race — without a finish line. No killer app ever decides it. So it remains, as always, up to us to keep it on the right track.

(Thanks to Rob Bruer for Tweeting that EC podcast.)

What's your electric intersection?

2010-01-28T17:10:00.000-08:00

Critical Path or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love (Integrity) Marketing

Published in 1981, Critical Path is one of R. Buckminster Fuller's last and most urgent books. In it he likens the all-in effort needed to avert planetary catastrophe to the effort to put a man on the moon. (The "critical path method" is a scheduling algorithm which was used in mega-project-managing the Space Race.)

Bucky tells us in his foreword that he wrote the book for four reasons, including:

"Because of my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly, right now."

Well then. Might as well go back to bed.

I read Critical Path in 1989, not without dismay. For that was the terminal year of Bucky's proposed path, the year by which, he argued, either we had to have gotten our utopia on, or we could kiss our asteroid goodbye. The idea that it all hinged on everyone suddenly embracing total honesty looked like the quixotic naïveté of a brilliant man who needed to get out of his Dymaxion house more often. But, try as I might, I never could shake the old man's exhortation. It worked on me like a proper zen koan, for years.

The trouble is, Bucky's right. If — indulge me in a big, blinding if here — if we are to create a sustainable life for ourselves on this planet, it won't be by sidestepping the truth. It's all hands on deck, and transparency is the prime directive.

Not gonna happen? Not the right question. Bucky's mission was not to wring his hands about what the rest of us would or would not do. (There are plenty keeping that project going.) His mission was to offer a solution. So that's what he did, to the best of his remarkable knowledge, experience, and ability. And that, compadres, is leadership. What the rest of us do with it is our responsibility.

Here's the deal: If you want to make a difference, find the most electric intersection of:

(A) What you know and love and excel at.
(B) What the world needs.

And have at it.

For my part, part A is creativity and communication, and the zeal to champion things I'm passionate about. Which happens to be the soul of good marketing (B). And my electric intersection? Building an integrity marketing agency. Making the world unsafe for status quo marketing & advertising founded on deception, coercion, and manipulation. Proving that truthful, participatory, integrity-driven marketing is more than doable, and more than just better: it's necessary.

Tilting at windmills? Not my concern.

So what's your electric intersection? Are you on it? ¡Felicitaciones, compadre! Still looking? It's close by, just waiting to be recognized. Of course, finding it is not a ticket to blisstopia. On the contrary. You have to be tough-minded. You have to be hard-nosed. Just don't waste your energy worrying about windmills.

The question is not, Is it realistic? The question is:

What side of If do you want to be on?

* * *

Props to Bucky for planting the seeds. I like to think he would have approved of Helsinqi.
Megaprops to Lindsay Hill for watering the plant.
Apologies to Dr. Strangelove.