I know our group has been responsible for some of the excellent creative work around this campaign - to temporarily rebrand COP15 as Hopenhagen - but I cannot help wondering if it’s not such a good idea after all.
As an advertising group, Havas is great (as are all our peers) at identifying and using the right emotional tags in any context. And there’s no doubt emotion plays a crucial part in the wider climate change debate, as well the negotiations currently playing out in Copenhagen.
But the focus on the emotional, on the leap of faith, on the notion of hope, suggests it’s this or nothing else. And it really does need to be something else.
It needs to be hard-edged plans and objectives, that give rise to steely unambiguous frameworks and mechanisms that allow a very important thing to happen: that business steps in and populates these frameworks in a way only it can do, unlocking value and prosperity via innovation and social capital construction. Like it or not, business remains the crucial engine in bringing around change within society: business helps codify emerging social trends and wants, into structured policy. OK, so this has worked in quite a perverse way in the last 18 months, with changes to society and government reaction that no-one is that keen on (and of course, Umair writes about this to great effect on this and his Harvard blog). But the fact remains: business is key. No matter which way you slice it.
But whilst business is contemplating (and in some progressive cases celebrating) this re-birth, another immutable fact remains: business needs investment. And investors expect a return. There’s no point pouring cooking oil into a decent engine, hoping it’ll run as well. In other words, if business is the engine of prosperity, then investors are the engine oil: the engine needs it, and needs good grade stuff to boot. And before anyone gets on their high horse and starts lambasting investors for short-termism and value destruction, we need to remember we are all investors. I agree that the term investor can be a strange way to describe the behaviour of certain institutions - akin to calling the Vikings in the 800s as ‘investors’ in our community life - but we need to stop seeing business and sustainable activity as polar opposites: James Cameron from the CCC makes this argument very well.
So if business is key, and investors in business are key, then do we really think a whole movement based on hope is a good one? I don’t.
Hope has its place, and as someone once said, when man loses his ability to hope, he loses the will to live. But does business enter markets on hope? Do investors invest on hope? Nope. Well, not the sort of investors that are worth having (the good engine oil…).
Copenhagen is not the right place for hope. It is literally a ‘once-in-our-and-our-children’s-lifetime’ chance to build gleaming, defined structures: agreements and frameworks that are so hard-edged, you need to wear a hard-hat just to go near them. And yes, all constituencies should appreciate this, not just ‘professional players’ in this debate.
So let’s not go so heavy on the Hopenhagen idea, as it risks rendering what has all the potential of being a landmark process in the minds of millions, into nothing more than a lighter-waiving vigil for intervention, with no-one quite sure what it is we’re looking for (let’s not forget that hope and naivity are often bedfellows). The result would be us all remaining in the dark (bar the lighters in the air, of course) fumbling for guides and cues.
And our children would remember Copenhagen less as Hopenhagen, and more as Gropenhagen.
Guy
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