Where do you look when you need an idea?
In my experience, the one place you don’t look is advertising, that’s called copying.
No, you look for an idea in a totally different field and see how you can adapt it.
For instance, many years ago, Oxfam called a meeting to inform senior advertising people about the Third World Debt crisis.
Banks had loaned many billions to developing countries, much of the money had been taken by corrupt dictators and had disappeared.
But the countries were still forced to repay the interest by starving their population of food and medicine.
Unicef estimated this resulted in 500,000 infant deaths a year.
They needed people to put pressure on the government and banks to cancel the debt.
Oxfam couldn’t get involved because of their charitable status, so they told us about it, and left it up to our own conscience whether we did anything or not.
Most of the senior advertising people weren’t interested, in fact one sent me a note saying “I only came along to try to get the Oxfam account”.
But I thought the possibility of saving 500,000 infant lives was a real chance to use advertising for good, and a chance to do what we always preach – to be creative.
If the whole problem was about raising awareness, that was what we were supposed to be good at: raising awareness to (hopefully) change behaviour.
In those days there was no digital or social media, just TV, cinema, posters, and press.
How could we get space in any of those if we had no money?
So here’s where I had to start looking for ideas.
One of the places I looked was a story I’d heard about St Mungo’s charity.
Apparently, St Mungo’s was a group of people who would visit London’s homeless on freezing cold nights and feed them hot meals from the back of vans.
But the part that inspired me most was St Mungo’s thinking on donations, and how they separated themselves off from every other charity.
They didn’t ask people for money like everyone else, they asked people to contribute some of whatever their job was.
So, for instance, they would ask Ford or Vauxhall for vans that they weren’t using.
They would ask Tesco or Sainsbury’s for food that they wouldn’t be selling.
They would ask Argos or John Lewis for old camping equipment or stoves.
They would ask BP or Shell for petrol.
They would ask van or lorry drivers to donate some time to help drive the vans.
They didn’t ask for money, they just asked for some of whatever you did, and that’s a lot easier to give than money
So, I thought that’s how we should handle the Third World Debt Crisis advertising.
We didn’t ask for money, we asked production companies to shoot our films, we asked labs to develop the films, we asked editors to edit them.
We couldn’t run our ads on TV (banks caused the crisis and were the TV companies’ biggest clients) so we went to cinemas instead and asked them to run our ads.
We found newspapers would often have adverts pulled at the last minute for various reasons, so we sent lots of ads in various sizes to the newspapers, for them to use when ads were pulled.
We found 48-sheet posters were fashionable but hardly anyone wanted 16-sheets.
So we gave the contractors 16-sheet posters to run on their empty sites.
We asked photographers, retouchers, and printers, to donate their time.
By taking inspiration from St Mungo’s thinking, we got a big campaign running at no cost.
So, the question everyone always asks is, did it work?
Well, advertising can’t solve the problem on its own, it can only raise awareness.
Before Oxfam told us about the crisis no one was even discussing it.
But now the government is discussing the debt at the G7, G20, Paris Club and the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable, with the banks and International Financial Institutions, all in one place.
So although it isn’t solved yet, advertising has done what advertising can do: raise awareness to (hopefully) change behaviour.
And it did it all for free, and that’s what real creativity is about.
Looking outside advertising for ideas, not just copying the way it’s being done.