Keeping Advertising Co-Creation Safe and Ethical
I specialise in advertising coproduction with children and young people – that is, I collaborate with children and teens on behalf of ethical brands to make beautiful, authentic campaigns. In this article I give a brief introduction to the safeguards and frameworks I use to support young people to do excellent work, and to stay safe and well in the process.
Co-creation (co-production or co-design) with children and young people is a new practice emerging in the advertising industry. It’s particularly relevant to brands and organisations who care deeply about children and young people as audiences, consumers, and beneficiaries of their work. Coproduction supports companies to consult and collaborate deeply and creatively, generating value for their businesses whilst supporting young people in their education, wellbeing and development.
It’s a practice I’ve spearheaded over years of working for Effervescent, but grounded in decades of research and development in education, play work, positive psychology, arts practices and community development.
Co-creation with young people happens over six stages:
1. My client briefs me, and we agree on a creative brief together
2. I, or my client, recruit young people who want to participate in the project
3. I work intensively with a group of young people to get insight into the product, service, or issue, and develop new original creative ideas to underpin the insight
4. I support the young people to pitch their idea to the client
5. Young people work with me and my team of reelance creative associates on developing the creative assets – sometimes this happens over the internet
6. Young people help prepare the campaign launch, including behind the scenes footage and press releases
When I talk about what I do, the first question most people ask is, “how do you keep the children safe?” Here’s a (very) brief introduction to the safeguards and frameworks I use to ensure that every project is ethical, meaningful, safe, and fun:
1. The welfare of children and young people is paramount; no child is ever placed in physical, moral, or emotional danger. All adults working directly with children are trained in safeguarding and trauma-informed practice. The safeguarding requirement includes the work which happens face to face with children during strategic and creative development; and any work which happens remotely with young people during the creative build phase of the campaign. It also includes campaign launch strategies, such as children being identified as collaborators on the campaign and being invited to interview with journalists.
2. There must be clear, shared intention between me, my client and their team, and the children and young people participating in the project. Minors are always fully briefed on the advertising campaign’s purpose, and they (and carers if children are younger than eighteen years old) give their informed consent to take part. They are fully informed of the processes, commitment levels, and creative brief; and they are assured that the professional team will attend to their physical and emotional safety during the project and the campaign launch period.
3. The entire experience must make young people feel heard, understood, and prized. It should be beneficial and enjoyable; give them the opportunity to establish and make sense of their own stories in the context of other young people’s similar experiences; and they should come away with new skills, increased wellbeing, and a new set of professional connections with an agency and brand. On each project, I commit to supporting all young people who have worked with me to help them develop creatively in the future.
4. The children and young people invited to participate must represent the relevant population. The group must be ‘balanced’ to take account of the campaign subject matter and intentions; so that children of all genders, ages, abilities, financial agency, caring responsibilities, can take part, and there is less risk of a group unearthing a truth which is not ‘universal’, but specific only to their collective. We spend a lot of time taking care to ensure that the process offers equality of opportunity to take part and to shine.
5. Some young people have current challenges, or past experiences, which make it particularly important that they take part; but that comes with extra risk – for example, of triggering difficult memories. Everyone must be ‘referred’ to the project by a professional adult with an overview of their current presentation and background. Young people give their consent for this information sharing, and data protection policies are carefully managed so that it’s possible to create a detailed assessment of the risk to each child produced by the group’s mix of participants.
6. To honour the young people’s lived experiences, stories, efforts in the creative development process, and voluntary commitment to the campaign development, there should be an absolute commitment to creating a high-quality campaign. Young people are afforded the same expectations and standards as their professional adult counterparts and treated as having their own realm of topic-specific understanding or expertise. To attempt anything less than an excellent campaign would be to treat children’s involvement as an excuse for poor quality; this would be antithetical to co-creation’s values, and disrespectful to children.
7. Advertising coproduction with children must be resourced and financed in the same way as any other agency-led campaign; to fund it at a lower level is to devalue young people’s contribution.
8. Decision-making strategies should be carefully negotiated at the beginning of the project with clarity on how difficult choices will be made, and who has the final say so that everyone feels empowered.
9. Physical and digital spaces for creative and strategic development should be child-friendly; comfortable and informal; and support the creative process without presupposing the outcome, or manipulating children into developing a creative idea pre-fabricated by any of the adult contributors.
10. Children might offer personal stories or information in confidence to the co-creation group, but any final campaign material must anonymise this information and protect a child from being made vulnerable.
11. Young people have equal right to campaign credits, and can use the creative material to support them in their future lives, such as university applications. Credits must be carefully negotiated regarding how and where children’s names are used, to protect their well-being and dignity.
Co-creation in advertising is new and emerging. If responsibility for co-creation of strategy and creative ideas is jointly held by all involved, it follows that responsibility for setting and maintaining these principles sit jointly between myself and the client, with the consent and input of the young people.
There are undoubtably tensions which may prompt one collaborator or another to remind each other of these principles, especially in the early stages of establishing this way of working – for example, a client will be accustomed to having final say on decisions; and this must be arbitrated through children and young people as co-authors/owners of the campaign. Whilst it requires more effort, this triangulation anchors campaigns in authenticity, which resonates with audiences.
Coproduction grows from older-style models of Corporate Social Responsibility, and moves the client from passive to active in the relationship. In early stages of advertising coproduction’s evolution, clients will sometimes need to be reminded to take risks; and reminded why they have chosen to trust in young people as coproducers of meaningful creative work.
New clients have to be sure they are genuinely ready to embrace coproduction, and understand that they have a duty of care to the young people to respect their ideas and insight drawn from their lived experience. Careful development of the creative brief before it is presented to the young people can, to a large extent, mitigate this risk; and early experiential training for the client’s team, which I can provide, can help to unearth points of potential tension or differing values before a firm commitment to a brief, and young people, is made. At the end of the process, clients are often surprised by how much value they gained from the process:
“I was excited by what I might hear from the [young people] but had no idea what to expect. Over the next few hours, they talked me through the insights they’d drawn from their own experiences and the creative process that had helped them turn these insights into a simple but powerful campaign concept. I learned as much that afternoon, and about the often overlooked wisdom of young people, as I had done in the previous three years.” Jim Cook, Head of Coop Foundation, September 2019.
