Q&A: The role advertising agencies can play in development work

NAIROBI — Four years ago, TBWA\Khanga Rue Media, an advertising agency based in Tanzania, began working with development partners on designing products and campaigns directly for beneficiaries. At this point, the agency began to devote resources to training its staff in areas such as the technical aspects of social behavior change communication campaigns and behavior economics, as well as working to develop partnerships in the sector. Now, the agency is working with development partners across the African continent and some of its employees are devoted full time to development work across all departments of the company, from finance, editorial, content making, and strategy. Through this work, the agency is often involved in national or regional social behavior change communication campaigns, aimed at changing norms and addressing community barriers. An example of this is the agency’s work with Population Services International on its Adolescents 360 program, where it aims to increase contraceptive use among girls. The agency also has its own products that it developed independently, which then drew in the interest of the development community. Noa Ubongo, which the agency developed in 2016, is a free learning channel aimed at tackling youth unemployment in East Africa. The agency is now partnering with the Financial Sector Deepening Trust, USAID's Tanzania Youth Economic Empowerment Activity, DAI and the Digital Opportunities Trust on the project. Devex spoke with Pat Olvera, creative director and co-founder of TBWA\Khanga Rue Media, about the value added to development work by advertising agencies and the role he sees these agencies playing moving forward. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What are some of the unique offerings and perspectives that advertising agencies can bring to the development sector? Agencies now are expected to play a much bigger role in their client’s business beyond creating advertising. Learning how to use data, developing new products, integrating technology, and creating immersive consumer experiences, mapping trends, forecasting the evolution of their sector, and securing strategic partnerships. Making advertisements isn’t enough anymore for most clients, including in Africa. Part of the problem is that the development sector has been too slow to recognize that. They think that we just do advertising. Agencies that are able to do the above will be a great fit for the development sector if they choose to be and of course if development partners recognize the potential. For example, we are working with PSI on a table-based app to help adolescent girls. It was created through a human-centered design process. We brought in The Busara Center for Behavioral Economics lab, who is a long-term partner of ours. Together with PSI, we created this immersive, content-rich experience that I think has the potential to revolutionize how we talk to teenage girls about family planning. But it involves everything that I just named — technology, local insights, creating digital products, strategic partnerships, and of course some great creative design. What it doesn’t involve is any actual advertising, or “traditional media.” PSI didn’t look at us as an advertising agency, but as a design-solution partner and it worked. It’s awesome. The end product, by the way, the creative and design, was largely driven by a 25-year-old designer in our office who had never worked in this issue and had no experience in family planning. But look at the end result. Did you have to learn to change your approach when pitching yourself to development clients? Of course we have to. This sector has its own language and its own culture. You have to adapt. I give a presentation to our other agencies where I match up words to demonstrate how we, in the marketing world, use different language than the development sector to mean the exact same thing. But you have to learn it and feel comfortable using it. If you’ve ever received the “acronyms list” from an NGO, you’ll know what I mean. We also learned to consult literature to back up our thinking. We’ve immersed ourselves in social and behavioral change communication and conduct regular training session to help make our team better versed. A lot of it is confidence. The NGO sector places a high value on academic credentials, for obvious reasons, but our sector does not. We only place value on creativity. We have people on our team that are amazing and didn’t finish high school. But we need to make sure they can at least be comfortable and conversant in these things. How do you manage your commercial versus development clients differently? We try not to, because I think part of our strength comes from applying some of the best practices of the private sector to the development sector. But of course, that’s not always realistic. These institutions have their own requirements and their own structures, which force you to adapt. You can’t ask USAID to adapt to you. But at least internally, the way we approach them from a creative standpoint, we don’t view them differently. Both require innovation, creativity, subject immersion, and local insights. “Seek partnerships, not just clients … Partner and complement each other.” --— What advice would you give to other advertising firms that might want to move in that direction? Seek partnerships, not just clients. We have a great partnership with The Busara Center for Behavioral Economics lab, for example. We’re doing multiple projects that we’ve joined forces on to bid. There are amazing institutions like that. Well Told Story is another example, same as Peripheral Vision International, that are doing parallel work. Seek them out. Partner and complement each other. Learn the language, learn the theory, read their magazines, like Devex, and most importantly, learn how donor institutions are structured. What does success look like for them? Part of the issue is that when NGOs or institutions partner with agencies, it’s always done as a one-off project. Agencies come at the very bottom of the process. They’re given a checklist usually: Create two television commercials, three radio commercials, four posters, with this and this. And after you hand those over, the relationship ends. It’s an awful business model. It doesn’t work in the private sector. No company would ever engage an agency like that because they know that it doesn’t work. When you see amazing, innovative work that has huge impact, it’s usually the result of a long-term partnership between an agency and client. Long-term allows for risk taking. It lets agencies immerse themselves in the business of their clients. It creates relationships. I know people working at agencies that seem to care more about their client’s businesses than the actual clients themselves. That’s what you want. But you’ll never get it from a short, one-off engagement. But for agencies, my best advice is: Take the plunge and try and get involved in issues yourselves. Like we did with Noa Ubongo, our free learning channel. We had an idea, we applied for funding and we didn’t get it. We could have left it there. Instead, we decided to create it anyway. Now we have several partners and are part of USAID’s Tanzania Youth Economic Empowerment Activity. “When you see amazing, innovative work that has huge impact, it’s usually the result of a long-term partnership between an agency and client.” --— Our sister agency in Nigeria, TBWA Concept, had an idea for a campaign to stimulate investment in the city of Aba, so they created an entire platform called “Proudly Made in Aba,” which is truly incredible. Again, no one briefed them. They did it. And now the Ford Foundation is onboard, as is the government. That’s really what it takes to stand out. Build something. Let institutions come to you. What role do you see advertising playing in development moving forward? I think that NGOs and institutions that view agencies not as “advertising agencies” and instead view them as design-solution partners will find companies that will bring creativity, skill, and technology to their projects, which is hard to find anywhere else. There has been a trend to reframe some of the challenges that NGOs are working on as design challenges. That’s given rise to human-centered design, along with companies like Frog, Ideo.org, and ThinkPlace. Agencies should be in that space. We were in that space long before any of them existed. Just in a different way. But as soon as you open the door to give creative people a seat at the table during the design phase of any intervention, then agencies should be there. And because changing norms and behaviors are so integral to development, agencies should have a bigger role than we do now. No one knows how to shift norms, influence culture, and behaviors better than us.