Fernanda Romano on How to do Good as a Brand in 2016
“Our new OS is the one that shows the establishment our butts. We are rebels. We have never been so rebellious.”
Those were the words yesterday of Fernanda Romano, Strategy & Creative Partner at Malagueta, Brazil. She was speaking in Bogotá, Colombia, at the fifth edition of the ElDorado Festival. Inspired by the festival’s 2016 mantra of ‘Amor y Paz’ (‘Love and Peace’), Fernanda’s seminar, entitled ‘The New Human Toolkit: Design, Technology and a New OS for a Better World’ examined the role of brands to do good in 2016 - a time in which one in three young adults boycott a brand based on the causes they care about and three in four believe that corporations should create economic value for society by addressing its needs.
One of the main examples she used to demonstrate this was Goldie Blox, a toy company set up for girls that’s smashing gender stereotypes with its engineering focused toys.
As well as a speaker, Fernanda judged this year’s ElDorado Festival and was enthused about the level of creativity she saw from Colombia.
LBB’s Addison Capper chatted with her to find out more...
LBB> During your presentation you spoke about the negativity of advertising for advertising’s sake. How does that affect your outlook in the jury room?
FR> It totally does affect it. Of course we still want to be entertained and, as I said in my presentation, you’re not going to save the world with every campaign. For example, chewing gum - don’t try and find a world-saving purpose with chewing gum because there isn’t one. You have to be careful of something that comes across as too cheap. For instance there was a piece of work for a feminine brand and everyone in the room thought it was written by men for men, even though it should be written for women. It was incredibly well crafted and it got some repercussion but if you think about the mission we have as communicators, it was wrong. We couldn’t award it because it was exactly the message we can’t see from brands anymore. So it does affect us in the jury.
LBB> I think it’s interesting what you say about chewing gum because there is so much pressure on brands to be some kind of force for good - but sometimes it’s just too try hard! It’s like the parallel to advertising for advertising’s sake…
FR> Exactly - you don’t want either of those extremes. And there are sometimes occasions when advertising for advertising’s sake will have to do. If you need to lower your price - it’ll have to do. And then there’s things like chewing gum - don’t try and save the world with chewing gum because that’s bullshit. But find your purpose - the reason people put chewing gum in their mouth is because either the taste of their mouth isn’t nice or because they want to find something to do with their head or relax. Don’t say that by chewing this gum you’re helping children in Africa.
It doesn’t have to be a world-beating thing - you could be a telecommunications brand and bring people together for many things. You could help bring together the victims of a hurricane, but you could also bring people together to have a party because having a party is good for humanity. We need to learn how to have a party again, we need to learn how to take the piss out of things. A good laugh is good to the world. When brand owners understand that when we say ‘do good’ we don’t always mean saving little kids. Just understand that, if you’re going to be in the middle of my movie or on my phone, at least make me smile.
Entertaining is doing good. Nobody is going around saying Netflix is doing a disservice to humanity - and yet people can stay at home all weekend watching Stranger Things, being couch potatoes, spurring obesity, but nobody is blaming that on Netflix. Why? Because it’s entertaining us. If we take a step back and stop being so hard on ourselves and realise that, at the end of the day, when somebody gives us a brief, it is to generate profit - if we do it right, we’re going to keep jobs, create profit and keep the economy flowing. We don’t need to be so hard on ourselves - we are doing good for the world. Now, when we are executing that brief, if we can find other ways to please people, perfect. Just don’t force it.
LBB> I really liked that in your seminar you said “education is the one thing that can save the world”. Why do you think that?
FR> We have access to a lot of information right now. Granted not everyone has internet broadband - in fact, here in Colombia, of 50 million people only 15 million have access to the Internet, and by 2018 only 28 million will have. But still there are almost 3 billion on the planet connected now. They have access to content - they need to process that content. That’s education. If we help people process that content, I think we will avoid wars, we will avoid discrimination, we will avoid racism, we will avoid misogyny. And we will avoid those because once I can put critical thinking into knowing about facts, that’s when I can learn that I have to think differently.
My example of this right now is Germany. We’re seeing a movement in the world right now of everyone swaying to the right, [politically]. Germany is not experiencing that, even though it’s at the heart of the European economy right now. They’re not going there because of the war and what the country did during the war is still so fresh for them. There are so many monuments around them to remind them. Even children will be educated about what happened - that child is learning critical thinking that that kind of behaviour is not cool.
Now you look at other places - let’s look at America. America has a lot of information and not great education. It’s one of the big issues actually. The education system is totally broken. But they went through horrible racism riots, they were part of the Second World War - but it’s like it never happened. I heard a story from New York of a taxi driver who was cut up by a black taxi driver, so he shouted something at him about Trump being elected. There’s no critical thinking - just because we have access to Google and the Internet, doesn’t mean that we are processing what we are accessing. I really do think that once we learn to process, we will learn we can’t act in these ways.
LBB> When judging ElDorado, what were the biggest trends and surprises you saw?
FR> I didn’t experience many surprises. The one surprise I did have was that I thought there would be better radio coming from Colombia. It’s a pretty big media here but we didn’t have a lot of great stuff. With regards to trends, you know this country has been through some horrible times and I think that permeates a lot of the work. There is a lot of government or NGO sponsored work that we know is not just for award shows - it’s real, they have to take matters into their own hands. They’re very conscious when they talk about it but at the same time they are very creative. If you take for example the bullet-pen that was created to sign the treaty - it’s brilliant and such a simple thought.
There were two other things I noticed. Firstly, this is a country that is incredibly talented at doing PR and activation. I think that’s probably because it’s difficult to put a lot of money into mass media, they have to create their own audience. Secondly, they’re very cheeky. They turn simple things into fun, useful things. There was a project done for an amusement park. When you go on a roller coaster, there’s a microphone and it records your scream, so when you come out you can buy your scream in a jar. It’s really cool, a very cheeky, simple thing. A lot of the work really looks at problems and tries to solve it in a simple way. The smaller the box, the more effort you make to get out of it. There’s not a lot of money here, so it’s interesting to see how ingenuous the work here is.
LBB> Do you think the lack of radio is a natural progression? Radio isn’t an incredibly popular advertising medium anymore around the world after all…
FR> We were talking about this because we had weak press, weak TV and weak radio. Weak press and weak TV, I can understand. It’s not because they’re not popular, I think it has a lot to do with the schools maybe not teaching those skills anymore. Their points of reference now are all these crazy integrated, or stunts, or virals. Radio is the craft of copywriting which is getting lost, and that’s very sad. I don’t believe there isn’t a demand for copywriting anymore because a lot of the web still involves writing, and I wonder if people, especially the schools, are conscious of it.
Radio isn’t so strong globally, I appreciate that - but in this country it’s a very big medium because there are four of five big cities, and then everybody else lives in small, remote communities in the jungle. So it’s big. But on the other hand I am sure there is a lot of useful radio that isn’t quite award worthy and you wouldn’t enter it into an award.
LBB> How was the overall level of creativity when compared with other markets?
FR> I think it’s pretty strong. It’s not a small country, it’s 50 million people - but a lot of those live in remote areas and are quite poor. For a small economy it is very creative. Do we see as much as we do in, say, Brazil? No. But then Brazil plays the award show game slightly differently - they invest in it because it draws a lot of attention. But if you look at some of the most remarkable pieces here, there is work for Coca-Cola, a juice brand, the government - the level of that work is on par with work coming from more mature markets. The pen, for instance, is not just a PR stunt - even the design of the pen is very well done. But they could do more and they could do better because the ability is here.
