Why Advertising & Social Enterprise are like Peanut Butter & Jelly

Advertising is like jelly to the wholesome peanut butter of social enterprise,  a fruity sweetener to the substance of  real business development and innovation.  Not surprising then, that I have spent much of my career trying to distance myself from this ‘fluffy’ end of marketing, usually in order to gain a hearing with the engineering community.  But over the last couple of years, I have begun to start learning about the advertising industry, understanding how technically and commercially it works in relation to mobile advertising, and carrying out early innovation work on the use of identity for targeting advertising.

At first, it seemed as if this was far away from social enterprise and charitable work such as betavine Social Exchange.  Now, ‘tho I’m beginning to think that advertising might be the most active enabler of social enterprise that we know today.  To begin with, there are the thousands of free services that are ad-funded.  Just think of Google’s many products and services.  There are also models in emerging markets where advertising is lowering the cost of access to communications.  In South Africa,  Vodacom’s ‘Please Call Me’ is ad-funded.  The service enables customers to text the ‘phone number of the person they want to call them to a short code.  The recipient receives a message from the sender which includes an advert and giving them the number of the person who wants to get in touch.  It improves access to communications for people in poorer communities, and is now being ingeniously used as a free micro – SMS service, customers have developed their own abbreviations, enabling them to make use of the spare characters to send messages which negate the need for a ‘phone call altogether.  Advertisers are flooding to use the service which has tremendous reach.

As neither Vodacom nor Google can easily be described as not-for-profit, I hardly considered advertising and social enterprise in the same breath, until I met Marc Lewis, an entrepeneur and creative expert who is also the driving force behind the School of Communication Arts 2.0 (#SCA2).  SCA2 will open in September 2010, it offers vocational training for advertising professionals on 3 pathways.  Art Directors, Copywriters, and Ideapreneurs.  SCA is unique in a number of ways:

• 50% of places will go to scholarship students, improving diversity in the advertising industry which is woefully under-representative of the population as a whole.
• SCA will have an investment fund, which will invest in student ideas
• The school is supported by 300 industry mentors drawn not just from the fields of advertising, but also those of finance, education, business and technology
• The curriculum is a unique, open wiki.  We’re building it here, it’ll ensure that the content is always fresh, relevant and up to date.  Inglis Jane will be contributing content to the Ideapreneur Pathway, on product and innovation management, as well as Inclusive and User-Centred Design.

I think SCA2 has a winning combination of social enterprise and advertising creativity.  The open nature of the venture, as well as the grass-roots support from industry, will produce qualified, entrepeneurial advertising professionals and some interesting new business ventures.  Watch out for graduates from SCA2, they will be like pots of peanut butter and jelly swirl.