Last year, we worked with Oxfam on the identity for their new campaign, GROW. The campaign is about positive ideas for feeding all 7 billion of us, without using up all the earth’s resources. Here’s something that’s been happening in Tanzania…
Happy International Women’s Day from Wolff Olins!
Few deserve a shout out more today than our friend and partner Hayat Sindi, founder of the Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity (i2 institute), who was just named to Newsweek/Daily Beast’s list of 150 Women Who Shake The World.
Raised in Saudi Arabia, Sindi convinced her family to let her study abroad in London in 1991. She excelled in school and became one of world’s leading biotechnologists. She co-founded Diagnostics For All, a new medical diagnostic technique which uses small, affordable paper strips and a drop of blood or saliva to diagnose liver disease, and down the line could potentially help in diagnosing AIDS.
Wolff Olins and PopTech collaborated with Sindi last Fall to develop the brand and identity around her newest project, the Institute for Imagination and Ingenuity. The institute is focused on encouraging entrepreneurship in the Arab community amidst an unemployment rate of over 40%. In Sindi’s words, her mission is to “create an ecosystem of entrepreneurship and social innovation for scientists, technologists and engineers in the Middle East and beyond.”
Read more about the i2 institute or check out the full list of 150 Women Who Shake The World
We love the Good For Nothing crew. So when an email went round asking for people to take part in one of their Creative Riots to find a way to raise £1 million in 50 days for the East Africa famine crisis we were more than happy to pitch in. Ambitious? Yes. A bit mad? Yes. Impossible? No.
Why?
Farm-to-Table
It’s a funny concept when you really think about it.
Isn’t all food from a farm?
Isn’t all food consumed at a table?
Well no, not really… and no, not always.
In fact, a whole lot of the food we eat these days is created in a lab and consumed in a car – if we’re being really honest, a lot of it is designed in a lab specifically to be consumed in a car. Fast food is as American as… well, fast food. The concept itself was born in America, it was raised and continues to thrive in America and has now become one of our most powerful and influential global exports. Fast food has fundamentally shaped the landscape of the United States and the world – quite literally and figuratively (pun intended).
Technology changes lives, and sometimes quite literally, sustains lives. But that awe-inspiring ability can be its greatest enemy. People, amazingly, often take a stand against things like advanced fertility treatment, artificial organs (an artificial heart transplant patient broke new ground this week in being able to leave hospital, go home and begin living an independent life) or stem cell therapy. There is a quite common view, that we will not let technology’s ability exceed our own. Two thousand years of a human centric world is built on this notion.
Also in this category of technologies too clever by half, is GMO technology. GM foods – Frankenstein foods – are often assumed to be insecticide or herbicide resistant crops and are frowned upon (this seems less right in a world still so challenged by famine). But GMO properties extend far beyond this – offering massive nutritional advantage. Purple tomatoes can carry a much heavier load of the good things that vegetables give us – health promoting anthocyanins. Golden Rice fights vitamin A deficiency and therefore the malnutrition that causes blindness. Other GM benefits can include significant reduction in carbon used for food production and the production of alternative energy sources for fuels and pharmaceuticals. We’re looking at hardier food, potentially better for us, able to fight disease and produce biofuels. The difference these technologies can make to vast parts of the world challenged by hostile environmental conditions is enormous.
Whilst it’s difficult to talk about GM in one lump - they, and their effects are too diverse (and there is no doubt, given their power, that they need to be deployed carefully) - there is much to suggest the need for a new climate of opinion. As long as the public don’t support research in this area, it will remain in the hands of private companies who can pursue opportunistic, sometime monopolistic intentions. We have to stop shooting ourselves, and the people who need help, in the proverbial foot. We have to bring GM into the mainstream – to serve public interests, not such commercial agendas. That means that it has to become something people feel much more positive talking about.
The biggest source of general resistance to GMO seems to be the idea that it is not ‘natural’. And yet our bodies moved beyond natural a long time ago – we continually consume all kinds of additives and drugs, apply a wealth of lotions, breathe in polluted air and literally shape our bodies and minds to physical technologies all around us. Natural is a fantasy. Ironic then, that one of the possibilities of GM technology could be to get plants and crops back to their original traits – to undo the muddying of plant and crop varieties which has happened already as a result of centuries of farmers’ cross breeding to create stronger, tastier, prettier variants which suit prevailing tastes.
The idea of ‘natural’ is holding us back and potentially depriving people of life-saving improvements to how we live. This is exactly the kind of issue that companies like Wolff Olins need to get their teeth into. How can we ensure that a one-sided story doesn’t take over, and that technologies with so much potential aren’t ruled out wholesale? It’s our role as a brand consultancy to keep looking at difficult issues with fresh eyes, in order to ensure that the pervading opinion does not shape our reality for the worse.
Suzanne Livingston
If you want to know what is going to shape the way we live more than any other factor – look no further than food. As food gets scarcer, prices go up, and players in the food chain start getting very rich very fast. More importantly, they will exercise enormous control over the resources that we all rely on – literally – for our survival.
Depending on how you count we all have spent progressively less of our disposable income on food (for the UK 30% in the 50s, 17% in the 80s, less than 10% today) and correspondingly more on housing (10% in the 80s, 20% today).Yet now bread, vegetables, eggs, cereals, milk, cheese are all rising in price faster than they have ever done before. So is fuel. Meanwhile real incomes are in decline.
My hunch is we’ll have to spend significantly more on food from now on. Because we simply won’t have a choice. The question is what’s going to give in return?
(Nick Keppel-Palmer)
Probably not. And definitely not if you have been eating KFC. Greasy, unhealthy, deep fried, heart attack in a bucket.
At least that’s the way I think about them and I haven’t been inside a KFC for decades. What if anything would change my mind?
Will dropping their tagline be enough? Of course not. But it might be a start.
I think they’d have to go a lot further though to win me back. What’s required probably involves more than a bit of transparency over calories.
It’s still chicken in a bucket. It’s not health food so why dress it up as if it might be? Maybe the unashamed honesty of Burger King’s Pizza Burger is a more honest, more authentic approach. 2500 calories. In a bun. Eat it if you dare.
(Nick Keppel-Palmer)
Big news of the week -and no, I’m not talking about AOL acquiring the Huffington Post - Organic Avenue has officially opened an outpost on Sullivan Street (aka 5 mins from Wolff Olins NY offices, aka I can now get my green juice fix any day of the week!)
For those who don’t know, Organic Avenue is a sweet little vegan raw foods / juice company - started as one small shop in the LES about 10 years ago, slowly expanding ever since. I first happened upon the company as a summer intern, who happened to moonlight as a bartender at the (then) newly opened Pure Food and Wine - one of NYC’s first (and certainly most gourmet) raw foods restaurants.
Born and raised in a town like Boulder, CO, the smell of wheat grass was nothing new to me. But at that time in Manhattan, the idea of raw foods, green juice or ‘eating clean’ was pretty much an alien concept (or at least a novelty delegated to the select few, rather crunchy natural foods stores around the city).
Fast forward to 2011… times have certainly changed:
friday is my day for yoga.
while i walk to the gym nearly every morning (up west 4th street, across west 11th), today i noticed the following:
- dog poo (customary)
- 3 used condoms (not as customary)
- stomped-on cockroach
- vomit
- sleeping homeless man
- various pieces of food/litter disgarded on the sidewalk
- overflowing trashcans
as i sat in my yoga class i contemplated why it is that i love and live in
new york city.
there’s something about being a new yorker that presupposes a
skewed sense of reality.
one that accepts all the bad
in order to soak up all the good.
it’s all about perspective, which is what makes brands so interesting to me.
“new york city,” the brand, is something i full-heartedly buy into, cockroaches, condoms, vomit and all.
but at what point (if ever) does a new yorker become a former new yorker?
at what point do people stop buying the brand in favor of something sunnier, cleaner, prettier, easier?
at what point does that skewed reality come into focus?
if it ever happens to me, i think i’ll blame it on advertising.
om.
(marissa)
On my way to work every day I pass through the W4th St. subway station in New York, where I walk by an installation of Gatorade advertisements. These images depict real athletes as they live some athletic moment of truth. This campaign accompanies Gatorade’s evolved design – a blocky “G” with a lightning bolt superimposed, and block CAPS on labels that scream messages that could have been written by my high-school gym teacher:
BRING IT.
NO EXCUSES.
BE TOUGH.
They’re DARING you to drink it.
You can’t measure up! Why are you even trying?
This bit of brand aggression suggests that Gatorade is seriousness and performance and results in a bottle, and by drinking it you’ll be about performance and results too.
But Gatorade has become just as aspirational as its target customer – both striving hard for health and performance that the product won’t deliver. The drinks pack 50 to 310 calories per serving, and are carbohydrate, sugar, and sodium rich. It’s angling to be tastier than water, healthier than a soft drink, using health, performance and testosterone as a wrapper.
It shows how design, communications, and even product development can become disconnected from the needs of the business and consumer:
There must be a sweet spot between what the world requires, and what Pepsi has to achieve as a business, that doesn’t require re-skinning Gatorade as something it’s not. To do it, business and brand have to lead what’s innovated, designed, and ultimately communicated.
Imagine the customer loyalty and affinity that could come, and the impact on sport, wellness, and overall public health were someone to innovate for the results that advertising in the health drink category promises…
(Britt Bulla)