What is Co-creation, and Where Did it Come From?
Co-creation is the participatory process in which a creative agency works collaboratively with children and young people as beneficiaries of - and experts in - a charity’s work to devise and develop marketing and communication assets.
In this article, I outline where co-production or co-creation come from in the advertising, health, and education sectors, and outline how they can be used not only to reach audiences more effectively but for charities to develop children and teens’ wellbeing and happiness.
Children’s charity advertising occupies a unique territory with a deep and far-reaching set of ethical challenges in terms of research, strategy development, creative production, storytelling, and impact on audiences. Sometimes it’s hard to cut through to audiences to show how important a charity’s work is, without making children and young people more vulnerable. Sometimes it’s hard to communicate the reality of life for some children in the UK, and the lifeline offered by some charities, without creating something that’s too difficult to watch.
Increasingly, charities are valuing children’s voice and influence in designing and refining their services. How much more powerful can charities’ communications be if children and young people play a meaningful and authentic role in designing them?
Coproducing advertising insight and creative ideas can create a positive impact for children and young people, giving them a voice, meaningful learning experiences, and a platform to say what they need to say. Children’s natural language is play and metaphor; children and teens generate beautiful, authentic ideas and creative assets.
Coproduction in advertising has been evolving for a while.
In the late 1960s, Philip Kotler and Sidney J Levy proposed that advertising could be used
“as a huge and increasingly dangerous technology, making it possible to sell persons […] things, propositions, and causes they either do not want or which are bad for them.” They offered a counterpoint that marketing could also be used as a positive force for “sensitively serving and satisfying human needs.”
Simon Sinek argued in 2014 that the most successful brands with reliable longevity are those who have a powerful purpose; a core ‘why’ which provides a unifying purpose and authenticity that consumers (literally) buy into.
The Team’s brand purpose provocation articulates the strength of brand value derived from a clearly expressed positive purpose, referencing the UN Sustainability Goals.
The trajectory, then, is a movement toward ‘good’ advertising for social purpose.
But there is significant risk in developing creative ideas which are not grounded in authentic insight, and in building strategies which appropriate other people’s stories. The Pepsi-Jenner story of 2017 is a brilliant example.
What can we do about this?
“Talking about the good you do as a company isn’t going to move the needle; actually doing the good is what matters. Instead of playing the hero, companies should champion the people that benefit from their enterprise. Instead of lauding their CSR accomplishments or donations, companies should instead find ways of empowering and enabling their customers, consumers and audiences to enact change themselves.’
Coproduction presents itself as an ideal ethical approach to advertising creation.
Coproduction is a specific strategy for working on shared goals between groups of people who all have a stake in a powerful outcome. It’s currently most prevalently used in the social care, health, and academic research spheres although it’s useful for user experience design, product and service design, and advertising production.
Insight, and the development of a creative idea, is one of the most challenging and valuable processes of advertising strategy development; it is particularly difficult for advertisers working for charities if they don’t have opportunities to work directly with vulnerable, often traumatised and disadvantaged, children and teenagers.
Coproduction between children’s charity brands, agencies, and children who benefit from the charities’ services has the potential to be the most ethical way of generating advertising strategies and creative ideas because it “rest[s] on equal and reciprocal relationship between professionals [and children] using services.” (Slay and Stevens,2010)
It avoids the Pepsi-Jenner danger of appropriating vulnerable or exploited peoples’ lived experiences; and instead works with them through an asset-based approach - which means children and teens are seen as people with something valuable to add to the mix, rather than a problem to be managed.
Creative coproduction techniques unearth truths not available to agencies through young people’s case studies as mediated through youth workers who are unlikely to have expertise in creative practice or strategic advertising development. It gives children, who have previously been silenced by structural inequality and trauma, a voice and agency:
“We got to tell our stories. This project has really developed my confidence – when we started doing this campaign I knew I was different, but now I can genuinely accept it. I have realised through this process that I am lovable and wonderful, after all, and that has helped me to find deeper and better friendships at school. I now have some great friendships with people.”
– Taylor, 13. Lonely, Not Alone by Effervescent, Coop Foundation and DDCMS 2019.
If advertising production for brands ‘is itself conscious, purposeful, serving, meaningful and self-aware, then we could embark on a movement that will change the course of humanity.’ Max Lenderman, Adweek Academic Council.
Coproduction moves the agency and client beyond focus groups which only test creative ideas already generated, with all the ensuing diversions and complexities created by asking people their opinion. It has the power to transform groups of people, and it supports the resilience of everyone involved in creative production: it moves the creative and strategic task into a space based in trust, shared research, and grounded in the authentic experiences of the client’s own beneficiary base. Creative coproduction done well creates a rich shared space to find out what wasn’t known before: a territory where original ideas thrive.
Slay, J. and Stephens, L., 2010. Public Services Inside Out.
[online] New Economics Foundation. Available at:
<https://neweconomics.org/2010/04/public-services-inside>