Futures to Enact: Towards Reimagining Advertising & Rewilding Futures
Thought this week
There isn’t ‘the future’ that we’re doomed to enact. There are all kinds of possible futures. And which one we’re going to get is going to depend on what we do now.
– Margaret Atwood, poet and novelist
First a few updates
Juggling projects is a challenge, and I admire people who make it seem effortless. I've had my share of multitasking this year but I'm excited to share updates!
'Making Good(s) & Future Fashion Factory,' part of my Future Humanity Systems, will hit your inbox (thank you for your patience) and be discussed in person at Source on July 14th. Join me to explore action points—register for free here.
I’m also thrilled to share today a groundbreaking report I had the privilege of being a part of: Towards Reimagining Advertising now available to download here. If you have more time, I'm diving into this below as the main focus of our exchange today.
Alongside these projects, Rewilding Futures travelled to the Future of Product Design conference and Birmingham University. In May, I also spoke on US TV about the future of Fashion and Industries with Hackmasters—all while planning my wedding!
I'll be teaching Speculative Design and Future Foresight at IED Barcelona in July. There is still time to register for the Summer course here. In October I'm excited to announce the Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum has asked me to deliver a keynote.
Busy times but progress continues!
Special shoutouts to Christina Bifano for bringing me back on board at IED after our pandemic hiatus! Can't wait to be there again with you, alongside the IED team and the always-inspiring John Wilshire. My Hackmasters family Saher Sidhom, Nikolas Fahlskog, Athena Chen, Ross Ambrose, Sabina Weiss, Nicole Wan. Futurist provocateurs Helen Job and Amy Daroukakis for pushing the conversations of business leaders in our room. Laura Perryman and her truly stimulating workshop on the future of product design. Lisa Merrick-Lawless, Ceri Jones and the Purpose Disruptor team.
Let's dive into Reimagining Advertising, a portal to the future now available for all of us to learn from and use in our work, encapsulating expansive, bold thinking towards authoring new systems.
The Future Foresight industry is intimately connected to the world of Advertising, which holds immense influence over culture, consumption, and aspiration. Explore how the field of imagination practices and future thinking can be applied to create outcomes for an entire industry.
The Journey
Like many of you, I've often dreamed of the advertising industry redirecting its superpowers towards the greater good of people and the planet. I was fortunate enough to contribute as a future systems thinker and writer to a project that explores just that.
In the visionary programme Reimagining Advertising, Purpose Disruptors brought together 12 changemakers from diverse parts of the advertising ecosystem—including creative agency AMV BBDO, media owner Channel 4, awards body D&AD, insights agency Kantar, brand NatWest, and media agency OMD—to ask, what could a different future for all parts of the advertising ecosystem look like?
Through a thoughtfully curated, long-term learning journey, Purpose Disruptors collaborated with their cohort of changemakers to catalyze mindset shifts and cultivate tangible action.
Shifting a system like the advertising industry
“Why start with an industry like advertising, of all places?”.
As Purpose Disruptors, this is a question we’re asked a lot.
Read the full introduction as a preview (3 min read).
The advertising industry is at the root of change as a network infrastructure with reverberating effects. Industries at the roots of all verticals (e.g. energy, transport, food, tech and fashion) are the professional services, including advertising and media, management consultancies, corporate law firms, finance and investment companies and more.
As outlined by the UNFCC’s Race to Zero’s work exploring the role of professional service providers in the climate transition, these industries have the power to exert disproportionate influence over the rest of the business ecosystem. They enable the ecosystem to flourish (or not) by both feeding it and providing support.
The advertising, marketing and media system has leverage in that it intersects between both the business world and wider culture. Our industry’s creative and commercial outputs shape citizens’ perceptions and aspirations, and have a deep impact on cultural and behavioural shifts. Yet our vast influence currently promotes a ‘good life’ that drives people to consume more, regardless of the fact we crossed 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries in 2023. The IPCC has confirmed our state of economic growth, and the business and culture that supports it, is “increasingly incompatible with a flourishing natural world”.
For a creative industry, we have not been very imaginative.
– Ben Essen, Chief Strategy Officer, Iris
There is a direct correlation between the advertising, marketing and media system’s brainprint on people’s behaviour, the natural capital required for their consumption and their carbon footprint. Putting a metric to this has been challenging.
Inspired by ‘Financed emissions’, Purpose Disruptors developed the methodology for Advertised Emissions, defined as the emissions that result from the uplift in sales generated by advertising to ensure holistic measurement of the industry’s emissions and facilitate greater transparency. In 2022, it was calculated that advertising in the UK influenced 32% of the carbon footprint of every single person in the country.
However the advertising industry is currently not incentivised to redirect towards urgent and ambitious new goals, protocols or metrics. This perpetuates particularly passive behaviours when it comes to sustainable transformation.
We need to reimagine our role and our system altogether. Along with leading nations and citizens, a growing body of businesses are already in the process of re-evaluating what commerce and the good life will look like within the next decade, in a world where the greater good of the people and planet comes first.
If the advertising industry fails to engage at this critical juncture, it risks missing an opportunity to use its creative force for good, shape the narrative and secure a positive role for itself in our futures.
To transform the current industry to allow a better future to bloom, we need to think systemically.
Systems experts refer to a system as a set of individual units, with relationships and flows between them: power, finances, resources, information and knowledge. To bring about a shift, we have to find the places to intervene and form new patterns. One small idea or action has the potential to trigger ripples of changes across the wider industry.
To begin this process, Purpose Disruptors crafted a transformative 6-month programme with changemakers from the advertising industry, using systems thinking, futures thinking and imagination practices.
The findings where we believe the biggest transformations can occur
From shifting the output of our work, to shifting the clients we work with, to shifting the business model we operate within:
Toward Reimagining Advertising draws out key learnings from a unique 6-month programme, spanning systems thinking, futures thinking and imagination practices designed in partnership with the RSA and supported by our research partner King's College London.
It imagines 3 radical shifts for the industry to transition in service of a thriving future:
Shifting the output - An industry where creativity is directed towards positive climate impact
Shifting the client - An industry that moves towards working with only progressive clients to change the brief
Shifting the model - reimagining business models fit for the future.
Three key recommendations for industry leaders include:
‘Invest in changemakers’'
‘Build networks to transform the system’
‘Shifting your business today for future generations’
As always, have a great rest of the week. Let's stay tactical and focus on our impact, not hype. It's hard work but it's time to be radically in service of our one planet and our shared future.
Hit reply to simply say hello and connect!
By Geraldine Wharry