Taking a stance is easy when it overlaps with your business

Harsh Kapadia fell in love with advertising as a kid when, according to his parents, the ad break was his favourite part of any television program. Now EVP and Chief Creative Officer at MRM, Kapadia has worked with brands including Google, Diageo, Reckitt, and United Nations, and a career highlight was when Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the United States, sent him a personal letter recognising his leadership and contribution to creating purpose-driven work. Kapadia grew up in India and has worked across four continents, in the cities of Mumbai, Melbourne, and London. He currently lives in New York. Here, the D&AD Jury President for the Impact, Future Impact and the new Sustained Impact category tells us how companies and brands can drive change while staying true to their business goals. 

I'm absolutely honoured to be the Jury President for Impact above all other categories. At a time when governments and individuals are overwhelmed trying to keep up with everything that demands our attention — from climate change to humanitarian crises — there are so many things in the world that need impact-driven work today. What excites me about the Impact category is it allows us to evaluate the impact brands are actually having. Every brand has an obsession, and if they do it right, with an overlap between their product or service and doing good for the planet, that can have a lot of meaning. For me, Impact is essentially creating an interdependency between a brand and culture, between a brand and the planet, a brand and society. (Editor’s note: D&AD Impact celebrates creative ideas that are driving the UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals.)

Brands are being scrutinised a lot these days, so it's not as easy as one might think for a brand to start an initiative that might have an impact. If you have a well-thought-out strategy though, you can have both short and long-term impact. If you have a well-thought-out strategy though, you can have both short and long-term impact. Great ideas sometimes start showing immediate spikes and impact, but the key is for brands to maintain that consistently, whether it be with the same idea or with a series of ideas as a movement. That's why D&AD has both Impact and Sustained Impact as categories this year, and where we will see the difference between the two is. Impact will celebrate recent ideas where we may or may not have yet seen the full potential of their impact, but we feel they have the potential to have a meaningful impact. For Sustained Impact, we’ll be looking for evidence on how brands have consistently been pushing impactful strategies out into the world and have created an interdependency between their cause and their brand philosophy. 

Today, audiences expect brands to actually act on what they’re saying and create impact. You can't just talk about it anymore. If a brand is talking about a certain purpose, audiences want to know that that company is not just doing that in the marketing team. They want to see that in their product, in their services, in their supply chain, and across the whole organisation, not just limited to the surface level. The debate every marketer should be having today is, how can we take the core of what our brand is built for, and align ourselves with the right reason to have our purpose.

Companies need to identify their obsession. This allows you to have an impact that's not only going to be good for the world but also relevant to your business. True impact is only going to be achieved when you find the overlap of being selfish with your business goals and the purpose that you're going after; because we can all sit back and say we want to do good for the world, but we also do know the reality of our business. If you can find that overlap, suddenly, your business and purpose priorities will come together, and it won't become a discussion of being charitable.

One of the biggest philosophical challenges is, are you pushing yourself to pick a side on certain issues? It's not easy for a brand or any organisation for that matter, to take anything but a neutral stance on things. I think it’s intimidating for brands and companies to take a stance sometimes, but when that stance is taken with the right overlap between your business or your service, it will feel natural for the brand to do it. It might get people to fall in love with your brand and be more loyal to your brand, and there’s a chance it might even create some audiences that don’t align with you, but I think it allows you to be more focused rather than trying to talk to everybody.

Last year when we judged Impact, I picked the Harley-Davidson campaign (Tough Turban, an alternative to a motorcycle helmet). I thought that had a beautiful purpose because it liberated the Sikh community. It was an interesting debate in the jury room, the discussion was about safety, while what fascinated me was not about safety, this idea was about liberation and not having to pick between your religious beliefs and your passion of riding a bike. Another great piece of work that also won last year was Data Tienda, where they took a very nuanced cultural insight that low-income women in Mexico were unable to become entrepreneurs because they didn’t have access to bank credit. They just had handwritten records of the women who had paid back their debt on time versus not. Unlike a lot of other countries, they didn't have something that had a credit score. The bank (Gahr We Capital) took all those records and turned them into legitimate credit scores for future loans, which not only freed the women from local loan givers but also brought them into a more official system.

I think when you look at your strategy as a business through the lens of impact, it could open up new audiences, and it could open up a more specific approach into how you talk to a certain group of people. And that has a ripple effect on your broader audience as well. There's a spectrum of topics that brands can tap into, but it is important to note that it needs to be the right topic, or the right subject area that creates that interdependency with their business goals. Because if that interdependency is not there, it's going to just feel like charitable work done on the side. And I think that's the difference between brands doing work for pity versus brands that are empowering or liberating the audiences they're aiming to reach. 

D&AD Awards 2024 is now open for entries. You can submit your work into one of three Impact categories, including Impact, Future Impact and Sustained Impact. Learn more about and enter the Impact category here.