What Do Game Changing Climate Communications Look Like?

Agency For Nature was founded on the premise that the climate sector has a communications issue. They asked themselves, what if the imagination of the advertising industry could help make the world a better place by marrying necessary communications with world-class creativity? 

About to go into their second season of campaigns, where driving a deeper relationship with nature for young people is a leading KPI, Ed Lloyd, Seed creative strategist and a cultural advisor to the Agency For Nature, shares his thoughts on how to connect with young people today.

Here’s what he had to say…

Lisa Merrick-Lawless> You are an expert in youth culture, I wonder if you could talk a bit about this audience generally.

Ed> This is a difficult one to answer succinctly!

This audience, and youth culture in general, is tricky to define as a whole – it’s not a monolith. Within this audience we see a number of contradictions. We’ve all seen the stats around the rise of far-right ideology among young men versus increasingly progressive young women. Beyond beliefs, we’ve also seen an explosion of subcultures amongst this generation as well.

But beyond the diversity of beliefs, interests and attitudes we see amongst this group, their culture is also difficult to neatly describe since you practically need to be chronically online yourself just to understand what’s even being said anymore. To most, it's a completely inaccessible culture, opaque through its cacophony of neologisms and references. Understanding gen z today is a bit like understanding modern art, with layers upon layers of referentiality, you need to have done the homework. 

So why is it like this?

As far as I see it, the most significant factor is how culture is encoded and disseminated. We’ve moved from a top-down, broadcast, physical media world into a rhizome-like, networked, digital media world.

In the '70s you were likely either a rocker, a punk or maybe a DND playing geek thanks to the way culture moved – staggeringly more slowly and with way less intermixing. It’s very unlikely you were all of the above, whereas today, this is entirely feasible and perhaps even likely. Today you can be into Hello Kitty, death metal and French new wave cinema at the same time. From this shift arises the incredible diversity and speed of culture today. 

This example brings me onto the first two markers of how I would characterise youth today, which are: plurality and nichification.

With subcultures now moving much more freely, and now horizontally (between people) rather than strictly top-down (from institutions), it’s now rare for subcultures to be mutually exclusive. Remixing ideas and embodying contradictions is something gen z revel in, so in this way they are a very pluralistic generation. 

And with this rapid, in-every-direction-possible movement of culture and information it makes sense that culture would rapidly splinter off into evermore niche subgroups. In fashion in 2023, we witnessed a new 'core' or aesthetic emerge seemingly every other day. Your clout is now measured by the obscurity of your taste, which micro-celebrities you follow, which designer micro-label you’re wearing etc. 

What’s interesting is how nichification is accelerating alongside the rate of our media. More exposure to all of these niches, the more mainstream the niche becomes, the greater the hunger to go even deeper. Being into mediaeval studies or taxidermy would have been reserved to self-described geeks just a decade ago, but now they’re “cool mysterious girl hobbies”...

Alongside this revolution in how culture moves, this generation is also coming of age through the spectacular end of the project of modernity and the global collapse of grand narratives. From the Occupy Wall St to #MeToo, Extinction Rebellion to Black Lives Matter and now post-October 7th, young people have led the charge for all these movements wrestling with some of the systemic problems of modernity.

The result is a kind of disillusionment about what society is for and where we’re going with all of this. So we see across youth today: yearning/nostalgia and hyper-awareness.

When there’s no dream for the future, nostalgia becomes a comforting thing as young people yearn for a simpler time, a time when the future existed. What’s interesting is how this equally results in y2k fashion and digital cameras as much as it does in Andrew Tate…

And then we’ve got our final marker, hyper-awareness. This gen is hyper-aware of themselves and of the messages they’re fed – it’s often described as their bullshit radar. We simply know too much to be lied to outright anymore, and so we’ve seen the death of 'purpose marketing' among gen z.

Lisa> So, how can we connect with them?

Ed> While these points raise significant challenges, they’re also opportunities for brands that dare to embrace the present.

1. Embrace the Weirdness of our Current Time

Match gen z’s freak and revel in the unknown and contradictions, invite plurality in and leave old-school notions of progress at the door. 

This isn’t to say your comms can’t be positive, but be cautious of grand statements and rosy language to avoid sounding like this:

​The strangeness of the now is an opportunity to imagine and fantasise new collective realities, an antidote to the nostalgia that - while a comfort to young people - doesn’t inspire hope.​

2. Get Creative With Your Formats And Channels

Media has never been more interesting.

We’ve got self-referential, intertwining narratives being told across multiple channels and accounts like with @veronika_iscool. On Discord, decentralised communities gather to co-run projects from gaming to activism.

It’s time to get beyond billboard-thinking and reconsider how and where you connect with your audience. 

3. Get Niche and Co-Create

The niche has never been more mainstream!

Get down into those cultural crevices and unearth those lost, latent audiences. Aligning with their niche interests gives young people a reason to care and expand their own taste and knowledge.

When you’re there though, don’t settle at mere presentation or reflection, actively collaborate with the individuals and communities spearheading these niches to make mutual growth possible.

4. Finally… have a POV!!!

Do all of the above but you must have your own point of view and reason to play. Young people don’t want to be extracted from or simply spotlighted, you’ve gotta come with some ideas of your own to excite them and give them a reason to engage. 

Because otherwise, the folks that are already doing cool shit and know how to connect, aren’t going to care about you being there. 

Lisa> Finally, on a personal level, what does Nature Connection mean to you?

Ed> Another difficult question to answer, at least succinctly. 

I guess the short answer is that for me, personally, I don’t find it fruitful to make the distinction between the natural and the artificial and certainly not between myself and the natural world. 

I think the metaphors, myths and ideas buried in our language and subconscious are crucial and I’ve been reflecting on mine with nature a lot recently.

I’ve definitely had times in my life when I fantasised about escaping it all “into the wild” style. And perhaps at this time I might have said nature connection means walks in the woods, swimming in the sea, hiking through the hills – and of course all this still does mean that, but not just this.

This is essentially nature as The Garden of Eden – unspoiled by human intervention, everything in perfect harmony.

This fantasy just isn’t particularly fruitful or even comforting anymore. There is such a huge tension for me between this idea of nature and the world as it is and as I experience it. As Donna Haraway puts it, “The cyborg would not recognise The Garden of Eden”...

I now find this framing fetishistic and feel that it has led to an antagonistic relationship between me and nature with a big 'N'. This Nature teases us, holding up an unattainable carrot of a self-sufficient, tech-free, living off the land, anti-capitalist, all-is-right-with-the-world, kumbaya utopia that feels at odds with my own reality.

With the spectre of climate change omnipresent, for me it’s become paramount to reconsider how I frame nature so that I may have a less guilt-stricken, yearncore, passive-aggressive relationship with it.

For me, this has meant dissolving the binary itself. Incorporating everything under that umbrella of “the natural”. No more humankind as villain and nature as damsel in distress. But just things as they are. A remarkably complex world where systems new and old are colliding. Microchips and mud. Fibre optics and forest fires. 

For me this has been a process of re-enchantment and when I think of the future now there’s just a little more hope and sci-fi-tinged imaginative possibility than the dead-end The Garden of Eden took me to.

If you'd like to hear more on tailoring communication strategies to target Gen z + next gen audiences you can get in touch with Ed, ed@seedmarketingagency.com.