The Wisdom of Lord Puttnam. (Very long, sorry - but don't worry, it's my last day.)

I almost gave up trying to get to London for the talk last night. (I live in leafy Surrey.) I was running late anyway, and then the train was delayed. I wasn’t sure I’d make it. But I’m glad I persevered, because it was terrific. I hope you won’t mind a bit of a ramblog abut it.

I only missed the first few minutes, and arrived to find Lord Puttnam in the midst of an argument about the role cinema can play in shaping people’s understanding of the world. By the time he got to the issue of climate change, he’d created a forceful theme about personal responsibility. He also drew what I thought was a brilliant analogy with the slave trade. Indulge me while I pass it on, won't you?

Until it was abolished in 1807, slavery was a key economic driver - just as traditional energy sources are now. So, just as now, plenty of business people were up in arms about any suggestion of change. But in just the same way, the true cost - the human cost - was deferred onto people who didn’t have the power to speak up. Today, that's people in places like Bangladesh, Africa and Central America already feeling the devastating effects of climate change. As long as we’re not paying the price, we look away.

The positive side of the story was that, according to Puttnam, abolishing slavery actually created enormous growth in the economy. It turned out slavery was actually holding the economy back. Getting rid of it unleashed huge ingenuity, creativity and innovation. The parallels with today’s energy situation are striking indeed.

As you can tell, it was a broad-ranging talk, but the theme of communication ran through it all, which is why I’m telling you about it. Puttnam regards climate change with the sort of grave concern it very obviously deserves. And he spoke passionately about the need to communicate the urgency of the message to all. Naturally, he focused on TV and cinema, but the single example of a great communication he actually quoted was a strapline. It was the slogan of the MIT team working on the carbon neutral car (which I'm guessing is this one). Their slogan is:

We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

That got a warm, delighted ripple of laughter and nodding from the audience, and quite right: it’s brilliant, isn’t it? No doom and gloom. No hand-wringing. Just a thoroughly positive - dare I say empowering? - line that says a great deal in eight simple words.* It’s kind of the antithesis of the Neilson poster. (Google informs me it's a quote from a poet and activist called June Jordan.)

There was another moment in the evening that highlighted the power of words. Someone in the audience suggested that the phrase "the environment" was unhelpful. "The environment" feels like something separate from us, something "over there". Instead, this chap suggested, we should call it "our environment", making it immediate and personal for everyone.

That, too, got a little round of applause – and a pledge from both Lord Puttnam and the President of the RSA that they would henceforth always refer to "our environment". I liked the idea too, so I’ll be trying to stick to that construction in future. Of such tiny changes are revolutions made.

It’s moments like this that remind you how much power we have in the communications business. Not just with words, but with all the tools we use - visual, verbal, strategic, conceptual - to get big ideas across to big audiences. Most of us put most of our energy into getting clients’ ideas across, and there’s no shame in that. But when you imagine what we could achieve on an absolutely critical issue like climate change, just by turning our guns in that direction, you wonder why we’re not doing a very great deal more of it already. (All credit to initiatives like Green Thing, Applied Green, and so forth.)

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* Quite separately, my favourite one-great-headline story is told in Robert Evans’ autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture. Evans, like Puttnam, was a movie producer (The Godfather and Chinatown, not a bad record). In 1969, he was struggling to sell the film Goodbye, Columbus to distributors. It was the story of a middle-class Jewish family, and this was the counter-culture 1960s: no one wanted to know. Evans had no marketing budget, so he cut a deal with Steve Frankfurt, then the young firebrand creative head of Y&R.

Frankfurt said he’d write them a poster for nothing. But if Evans decided to run it, he wanted $100,000. This is in 1969, remember. The poster Frankfurt presented carried the line, Every father’s daughter is a virgin. It resonated hugely with Sixties parents. Like the MIT line, it says a lot in very few words. And it worked – although it must be said, it worked very small on a very big image of Ali McGraw. (Words and design together again.) The picture was a hit. And Steve K got his $100K. Not bad for a poster.

Comments

[Matt]

'Instead, this chap suggested, we should call it "our environment", making it immediate and personal for everyone.'

Yep. I get extremely angry when I here people saying we have to 'save the planet'

Generally I hit the table with both fists and wail that THE PLANET IS GOING TO BE JUST FINE. IT'S US WHO WILL BE SCREWED.

By consensus, Earth has about another 5 billion years or so until the sun starts trying to fuse iron and expands until it boils the planet into space.

It *is* our environment, our ecology (such as it is) that is unsustainable at the moment.

The planet doesn't need us to be saved.

Thanks for writing about the talk, and I think the slavery analogy and "our environment" are excellent points.

Here's hoping the audio gets posted to the RSA website soon.

[Mike Reed]

Well said, Matt. I haven't really heard the argument framed like this before, which seems insane - it's not only more accurate, it's far more motivating. Great stuff, thanks.