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Condé Nast and Deloitte Digital have teamed up to present Digital Acceleration in the Time of COVID, a nine-part series of stories from global business leaders who've charted a path through uncertainty.
Here, Kelly Schulz, Head of Brand and Marketing for Belong explains how they were able to deliver a difficult message to a weary audience with both positivity and empathy.
Few countries have grappled with the effects of climate change quite as fiercely as Australia. Catastrophic bushfires that started in June 2019 ravaged the nation for nearly a year, charring more than 27 million acres of land, devastating wildlife and displacing countless people. That’s more territory than the entire US State of Tennessee; and it was just the beginning. By early this year fires were raging near Perth, with residents fleeing in the middle of the night to escape. Hovering over it all: COVID-19, the worst pandemic in over a century, its own special embodiment of the interrelated crises we humans face.
But Melbourne-based telco Belong—a tireless advocate for corporate purpose—sees more than crises. It sees a mandate to act.
Doing the right things
Belong is a fighter brand launched by parent company Telstra in 2013, and has spent nearly a decade growing into its role as a cause-driven organization. In that time, Belong has evolved from a low-cost telecom provider to an industry-defining change agent focused on the triple bottom line: a business philosophy that suggests organizations measure success not just in financial terms, but societal and environmental as well. Belong has led by example here; some years ago it assessed the greenhouse gas emissions of its products and operations, made appropriate changes, and by 2019 had become Australia’s first carbon neutral telecommunications company.
Kelly Schulz, Belong’s Head of Brand and Marketing, explains how this happened. “When you're creating a culture of innovation… it’s a really nice hand-in-hand for people to push people and high performing teams—they want to be doing the right things. It's what gets me out of bed in the morning.”
She continues: “and quite frankly, if you're not doing the right things what are you doing with your life?”
Kelly Schulz
Head of Brand and Marketing, Belong
Dirty data?
Even Schulz will admit that Belong’s carbon-neutral status is a bit unlooked-for by the vast majority of Australians. Though it’s estimated that Australian mobile data networks create more than half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, less than ten percent of Australians realize they contribute to carbon emissions in the first place. While 500,000 tonnes may be a fraction of the CO2 produced annually by the energy or agriculture industries, those emissions—largely generated by mobile data towers and thousands of miles of service lines—are still significant.
And they’re growing apace with increased usage of telecom services, meaning the need for public awareness on the issue is also growing. Near-universal mobile device adoption means people take them for granted, so Australians just aren’t paying attention—a dynamic not lost on Schulz.
“You can understand a retailer or an energy producer, because they have bricks and mortar stores that consumers are aware of.” But, she adds, wryly: “We don't invite consumers to visit our mobile towers very often.”
Cue the pandemic, lockdowns, and forced telecommuting and suddenly telecom demand surged. People were almost literally living online. For Schulz—who is blind—the shift was almost welcome.
“The biggest impact of COVID for me has been this idea of accessibility, which has been a big part of my life,” she says. “All of a sudden everyone else was really realizing what it was like for things to be inaccessible to them.” Schulz, on the other hand, has been experiencing the flip side. “If I want wine and cheese this afternoon, I can get that now in a way that I haven't been able to in the past.”
No matter an individual’s circumstances, the exceedingly high demand for telco services created a rare mix of audience and attention for Belong and its brand message.
With modern life slowed to a standstill, consumers everywhere were reconsidering their daily routines and their effects on health and wellness. But with such low awareness of telecom’s contribution to climate change, turning to a carbon-neutral mobile provider was a low priority for most—especially since reductions in air travel were making headlines for their positive impacts on the environment.
“Plenty of people would have said to you at the time, ‘Hey, I don’t need Belong to be carbon neutral,’” Schulz says. “But we’re still going to be carbon neutral, we won’t pass that cost on to the customer, we’ll do it simply because it’s the right thing to do.”
Many people had lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and just wanted reliable service at low cost —something Belong already offered. Now it needed to convince prospective customers that its carbon neutral status—two-thirds of the triple bottom line—didn’t represent added cost. But how?
Pragmatism and poetry
The concept of a carbon footprint was well known; the idea of a thumbprint tied climate impact to telecom data usage. Belong had serendipitously been working with Deloitte Digital pre-pandemic on a Carbon Thumbprint awareness campaign; COVID consolidated the audience, and product demand gave Belong a microphone. Carbon Thumbprint would serve to educate Australians about telecom’s climate impact, and how Belong was already solving the problem.
“We wanted to mix that pragmaticism with poetry,” says Matt Lawson, APAC Chief Creative Officer for Deloitte Digital. “It's almost become white noise, those huge environmental numbers that should be shocking and no longer are. We wanted to bring our message to life before people's eyes and make it tangible."
To do so, Belong started with a Carbon Thumbprint mobile app that provided a rich augmented reality experience. App users input information about their mobile data usage, and the app calculated their estimated CO2 emissions by way of dark clouds hovering over the user. Combined with traditional campaign collateral—videos, a landing page, etc.—the app brings the impact of a user’s consumption to life in their own immediate environment, underlining the real-world consequences of each individual’s behavior. Belong made the intangible, tangible.
A sampling from the Belong Carbon Thumbprint creative campaign.
Of course, the general ambience of fear brought on by the pandemic made for a weary and wary audience, so Schulz and team had to frame their message with empathy and positivity—and tangible solutions to addressing climate change. (As the narrator says: Well, there is a solution).
“We didn't want this (campaign) to just be pointing the finger and being a doomsday naysayer without presenting a solution,” Lawson says. “It was always presented that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The light is the hope at the end of the tunnel, and the very real solution.”
A year into the pandemic, Belong’s Carbon Thumbprint campaign has garnered about 148 million total media impressions and over 14,000 app downloads—an estimated campaign reach potential of more than 17 million across all formats. But its greater impact—like COVID’s—will be measured for years, if not generations, to come.
“Overall, if nothing else, the pandemic has showed us how important actually cleaning up after ourselves and looking after the planet—and looking after each other—actually is," says Schulz. “Your individual impact contributes to a global impact. It's about every human contributing to the whole.”
Schulz and her team are up for the challenge—not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because the world needs people working to ensure its survival. And we never know when the world might need them the most.
“For us, that human impact is one that people don't have to see, because we, as a business, should be taking that responsibility,” she says.
“And we don’t know when that next (global) event will be.”
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