Digital communications: Creating revolution from evolution

We live in a time where the “mainstream has fallen behind the zeitgeist” – the words of former film mogul and now professional thinker and policymaker, David Puttnam earlier this month, describing the ‘creative industries’ response to the greatest challenge humanity faces – sustaining our ecosystems.

Puttnam compared the current crop of creative talent with the pinstriped admen of the early 1960s, who were completely out-of-step with the hippy counter-culture that was transforming traditional notions of morality and sexuality. In 2010, leaders of the creative industries; including those working within the fields of design, fashion and advertising are, according to Puttnam, failing in their responsibility to communicate the obvious: “that we need to balance short-term desires with long-term collective needs”.

The evidence for this collective denial of reality is all around us – on every car-packed road, in every overflowing rubbish bin and across every unwatched LCD display. But that’s not the whole story.

I’ve only been working in sustainable development for two and a half years, most of it at leading sustainable development NGO Forum for the Future but in that time I’ve already seen some radical innovations – Dulux reformulating their paints, the main players in UK outbound tourism industry signing up to performing more responsibly, Cadbury embracing Fairtrade, to name but a few Forum-led projects.

But perhaps the most significant progress on our path to doing things that are good for people and the planet hasn’t been in a formal sustainability sense but in the way we share and exchange information. From the Twitter rebellion in 2009’s Iranian elections, to the citizen reporting of the Haiti earthquake or the angry and highly motivated ‘Motrin moms’, – the power to share information instantly across social networks is forcing governments and corporations to revisit their relationships with people and each other.

And this has great implications for sustainable development, although we may not be calling it that for much longer. As organisations and communities connect with each other, unhindered by distance and language, doing things right has never been more important. Governments and companies are waking up to the new reality. My Mum will know when BP have managed to stop the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico at the same moment as Tony Hayward because she’ll be able to watch it on the webcam.

That’s why I’m really excited to be at Clownfish. As a sustainability communications agency we are part of the Aegis Media group, giving us access to the leading digital content providers and planners. We’re going to be helping our partners and clients to develop and communicate their sustainability journey with the most powerful communications tools ever invented, harnessing these to empower real people to do good and feel good and enabling positive change from the bottom up as well driving it from the top down.

Puttnam’s right to compare the current “mainstream” to the (M)admen of the sixties but only just. With the communications revolution currently writing its way onto every hard drive on the planet, it won’t be long before the zeitgeist has been thoroughly caught up.