In his earlier function as affiliate inventive director at New York-based inventive company Mustache, Adam Lerman constructed up a decade of expertise in crafting content material that communicated complicated points in actionable and digestible methods, working with high manufacturers reminiscent of YouTube, PepsiCo, Neutrogena and Sony.
Now as world inventive director of sustainability at Accenture Tune, a subsidiary of world consultancy heavyweight Accenture, Lerman is making use of these similar abilities to creating campaigns, companies and merchandise that discuss sustainability in a compelling manner.
Lerman shares what drew him to the function, the realities of transitioning from company to consultancy, and why empathy is the cornerstone of compelling inventive content material in ESG.
Shannon Houde: You’ve been with Accenture Tune for a bit of over a yr now. Inform us about your present function. What does it entail?
Adam Lerman: Accenture is a huge world consultancy of almost 800,000 folks. It is primarily a nation of an organization. I’m a part of this “Mod Squad” workforce known as the Sustainability Studio, which is absolutely type of a “Mission Inconceivable” group, the place they’ve taken all these mavericks and put them collectively.
Half are creatives and half are sustainability-focused professionals. So, a mix of sustainability strategists, enterprise and product designers, and progress leads, in addition to writers, artwork administrators, designers, model strategists, communication strategists, and many others. We toggle between working as people and as a hive thoughts.
Our purpose is to make sustainability related and actionable for everybody, be they colleagues, shoppers or folks. Internally, meaning using our rigor and creativity to speak and embed sustainable considering at a bigger degree — and to accomplice with sustainability companies and different groups inside Accenture to extra impactfully and creatively promote sustainable merchandise, companies and capabilities to shoppers.
However we additionally work with our personal shoppers to construct inventive content material for his or her sustainable services and products in ways in which is likely to be overt, or ways in which is likely to be extraordinarily refined. Many ideas round sustainability are manufactured by a minority of elite of us for whom their terminology and worldview is irrelevant to most individuals. Our newest analysis venture, Our Human Second, examines precisely this concern. If the phrase “Sustainability” is divisive to the worldwide majority, how do you encourage engagement utilizing the entire instruments of human communication and enterprise and product design with out ever making it really feel alien or totally different or kind of imposed upon?
Houde: And also you transitioned over to that function from a non-sustainability background. Are you able to inform us a bit extra about that course of?
Lerman: I used to be a inventive for the higher a part of a decade and all the time had an curiosity in science communication, however it was one thing that was simply occurring under the floor, not one thing that I had considered early on in my profession. Then I labored with a significant local weather group as a consumer. I loved the possibility to work with them, however I additionally thought it was preaching to the choir and probably not shifting the needle. It made me notice that I used to be fascinated by methods to talk these concepts extra attractively. I began actually engaged on methods to be a greater inventive, whereas constructing my data on local weather and sustainability by way of self-education.
Then on the finish of 2019 I made a decision to kick issues up a notch and joined NYU Stern’s Company Sustainability Program. At that very same time, I bought concerned with Clear Creatives, a worldwide community of execs making an attempt to get fossil fuels out of promoting and PR. I had additionally been cold-calling VPs of sustainability and asking them, “What’s the function of inventive communication in sustainability to your group?” They’d say, “I do not perceive that query.” And I simply thought, “Oh, that is improbable. That is a whitespace.” All that pushed me ahead.
I constructed up a community, working with tasks like Clear Creatives, and thru that community was made conscious of a job at Accenture Tune that was the right match for me of creativity and sustainability. By that time I had fully overhauled my resume and my private assertion and all the manner that I spoke about who I used to be and what I used to be centered on. I had a handful of interviews and I used to be employed.
Houde: How have you ever discovered the shift from company to consultancy?
Lerman: Companies have a tendency to start out from the bottom up because it takes longer to ideate options. And in order that’s a problem in a consultancy setting. However one which I feel helps to show the folks that we work with methods to suppose in a different way, and maybe extra creatively, and doubtlessly in a manner that’s extra impactful for the human beings that they are chatting with.
Houde: Given your deal with considering so rigorously about how we assemble inventive content material to achieve everybody in a manner that resonates, what are a number of the key learnings you’ve constructed up from that?
Lerman: I do not imagine there’s one message. You do not resolve for local weather change, you resolve for a trillion different issues that add as much as that. And so, you diversify your efforts and also you deal with issues which might be significant to folks.
Every part must be rooted in empathy. If you’re not taking your self out of the equation, and placing your self within the footwear of the particular person to whom you’re talking, none of your work will matter. And I feel that is relevant to each business, however typically forgotten for the sake of enterprise effectivity or social cohesion.
We simply completed engaged on a marketing campaign of “What’s circularity?” to assist consumer account leads promote round transformation to main world companies. We created this 20-page deck that by no means has various sentences on it and plenty of nice human design to get folks to go, “Oh, I get it, it isn’t a principle, it is actions that I can take.”
We additionally simply accomplished a VR-driven multisensory expertise known as Forager that debuted at South by Southwest, the place an individual within the headset turns into a part of the life cycle of fungi. You begin as a spore that floats down onto the bottom and spreads into the mycelial community underground connecting timber, after which sprouts up as a mushroom, after which a spore once more.… The purpose of it’s you may’t defend one thing that you have not fallen in love with. You want them to go, “Wow, that’s superb.” After which you may go into all of the methods these ecosystems like outdated progress forests assist us.
Houde: In the case of communications and artistic, how do you and your shoppers measure habits change because of these tasks?
Lerman: I feel for those who arrange your initiatives to be measured by the metrics that you simply already use, or can undertake, it is actually price doing. When you’re rolling out a round service, then the metrics of common enterprise success are already there. You are gross sales, you are trying on the PR metrics of how a lot issues are being talked about, you are how these services or products are displaying up within the zeitgeist.
I am not a behavioral psychologist. I do not actually know precisely the way you try this. My guess is that it would change from product to product, or service to service. There’s an infinite variety of variations. If Netflix needs to make extra sustainability-oriented leisure, they may measure that by seeing their viewership metrics for a film, like “Don’t Look Up.” The habits of ingesting local weather allegories like that’s on the rise — to allow them to measure habits change in that manner.
Houde: For somebody seeking to observe in your footsteps, how necessary do you are feeling that schooling certifications are in relation to coming into an influence area like yours?
Lerman: The 2 teaching programs that I went via had been each priceless in numerous methods. The NYU program lasted a number of months and allowed me to get a really deep understanding of company sustainability. The Heart for Sustainability & Excellence expertise was extra of a quick follow-up which lined the headlines of what I had already discovered at NYU, however was very handy from a time perspective. It was additionally extra centered on connecting and speaking with the opposite members, so I used to be in a position to hear a whole lot of totally different views and study different folks’s experiences, and simply meet extra folks in a short time.
Everybody’s journey is totally different, and everybody’s wants are totally different. I all the time suggest Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s Local weather Motion Venn Diagram. I feel it’s nearly asking the query, What are you already nice at? Do you anticipate that you can be doing that, however maybe with a higher deal with sustainability? And do you really want to pay for any type of schooling that will help you try this? That’s not a query anybody else can reply however your self.
