Taking Inspiration From Conservative and Right-Wing Campaigns With Sam Narr
This episode features a conversation with Sam Narr, Founder and CEO of Kibbo Kift Agency, a specialist PR and performance marketing agency exclusively promoting climate solutions and social justice initiatives.
Heavily influenced by his third-generation immigrant background, working-class roots, and an education in radical social movements and pop culture, Sam’s motivation to work in environmentalism stems from an ambition to rebalance society's social and racial inequities.
Over the last five years, Kibbo Kift Agency has worked with 60+ clients including climate activists, corporate pressure groups, innovative tech start-ups, responsible fashion brands, global climate organisations, and more.
Kibbo Kift's projects have included a national campaign with Greenpeace UK, a national campaign to pressure MPs to support the only proposed legislation that ensures a joined-up approach to tackling the dual climate and nature crises, as well as ongoing media management of advertising and PR pressure group Clean Creatives, and global press office management for the world's largest digital clock, The Climate Clock, which counts down the time left until humanity passes the 1.5C threshold.
Amongst other things, Sam and I discussed the rightwards political shift happening across the UK, Europe, and the United States, where this issue gets tangled up with climate, and what can be learned from the campaigns that brought us Brexit and Trump.
Additional links:
Visit the Kibbo Kift Agency website
Check out the Climate and Nature Bill campaign
Explore Britain Talks Climate from Climate Outreach
Ding dong, it’s The Climate Clock
Dig in to the Communicating Climate Change E-Learning Course on the Creatives for Climate Community Hub
See The Brexit Bus
Read about the Stop the Boats campaign
Reclaiming Englishness with Caroline Lucas
Communicating Climate Change Call-In Show #1
Dickon: Hi and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practises and the worst offences, always looking for ways to help you, and me, improve our abilities to engage, empower, and ultimately activate audiences on climate related issues.
This episode features a conversation with Sam Narr, founder and CEO of Kibbo Kift agency, a specialist PR and performance marketing agency, exclusively promoting climate solutions and social justice initiatives. Heavily influenced by his third generation immigrant background, working class roots, and an education in radical social movements and pop culture, Sam's motivation to work in environmentalism stems from an ambition to rebalance society's social and racial inequities.
Over the last five years, Kibbo Kift agency has worked with 60+ clients, including climate activists, corporate pressure groups, innovative tech start-ups, responsible fashion brands, global climate organisations, and more, in projects that have included a national campaign with Greenpeace UK, a national campaign to pressure MPs to support the only proposed legislation that ensures a joined up approach to tackling the dual climate and nature, as well as ongoing media management of advertising and PR pressure group, Clean Creatives, plus global press office management for the world's largest digital clock, the Climate Clock, which counts down the time left until humanity passes the 1.5° threshold.
Amongst other things, Sam and I discussed the rightwards political shift happening across the UK, Europe, and the United States, where this issue gets tangled up with climate, and what can be learned from the campaigns that brought us Brexit and Trump. So, let's get on with it. This is Communicating Climate Change with Sam Narr.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
Sam: Of course, thanks Dickon, and thanks for having me on. I've been an avid listener of this for a long time, so it's great to be on. So, good question. I mean, I'm dedicated to kind of using communications to help solve the climate crisis. I believe the communication of the crisis hasn't been told effectively. So, I think there is a communications crisis at the centre of telling the true impact of climate change. And I mean this in the sense that our world leaders aren't acting with enough urgency, so partly because our democratic systems are flawed and not working. So, quick examples of that are: the delay in moving away from the fossil fuel industry; the notion that EVs are worse than petrol cars; renewable energy is too expensive. We've seen so many times where what once are progressive kind of things, but they get halted, and that's at the expense of progress and and the climate. So, I think we're at a stage now where really positive climate communications is exposing the levels of hypocrisy and corruption that exists, because the facts are simply being ignored. The amount of climate journalism that's out there, the amount of times that the warning siren is being sounded, it makes you question what do we need to do is communicators to get the message across?
And I think time and time again I go back to “everything's political”, right? So, I come back to the idea that democracy is flawed and the system is not working properly. So, we need better leadership. And I think when you combine the two, you start to see the connection a lot when you're working in this space every single day.
Dickon: For those who aren't aware, perhaps of Kibbo Kift’s work, could you give an introduction to how you approach things?
Sam: We are PR and for this marketing agency that exclusively promotes climate solutions and social justice, and that comes off the back of me working at various consumer agencies and, kind of during that process, becoming disenchanted with the current system in terms of big brand world and people not kind of prioritising the climate conversation within big brand world and all of the kind of hypocrisies that come out of that process when you start to to question and understand why that is. And yeah, my kind of inspiration for coming into this more so's like a recognition and understanding that the climate crisis will disproportionately impact the working class and ethnic minority communities, not only in the UK, but also the Global South as well. So that was really my entry point into really caring about the climate crisis.
And we've worked on several political campaigns, climate organisations, we've worked with the likes of Greenpeace, with Clean Creatives, which is an anti-fossil fuel industry pressure group in the advertising PR industry, and the Climate Clock, which is the world's largest digital clock face in New York City, and we kind of take that around the world. And we've also done some really interesting campaigns specifically on climate comms messaging, such as the campaign with Climate Science Translated, I think you've spoken to those folks before, who are pairing famous comedians with climate scientists to really explore communicating climate change but in a new and fresh way using and humour and comedy, which was really interesting.
And yeah, I mean I suppose I wanted to kind of quickly talk about some recent events which has made this really personal for me as well.
Dickon: I more than welcome it.
Sam: Yeah. Thanks so much. I mean, what we've witnessed over the last few months, specifically in the UK and specifically in terms of my heritage and my background, was a lot of racist riots that happened in the UK during the summer.
It came off the back of these brutal killings of three young girls in which the police held the identity of the perpetrator, and he was underage, that was the reason why they held that. But then this led to Far Right extremists, kind of spreading misinformation and whipping up Far Right communities across the UK into a state of frenzy and off the back of that, there was violent flash mobs that spanned several days and they all had, like, racial and religious hatred at the centre of it.
We saw mobs attacking hotels housing migrants. They tried to set buildings on fire. They were pulling people of colour from cars to attack them in the communities where I'm from. So, as a British-Asian immigrant, obviously I've had an awareness of this growing up for a long time and had racial insults myself growing up. It wasn't much of a surprise because I knew it was bubbling away for a really, really long time, but it was the first time ever in my life that was advised to stay at home and not leave my house, for fear of my own safety. And that was a real moment where it's like, “Hang on a second. You thought all of this stuff was left behind, but it's now coming back around," so I think, like, exploring the theme of Far Right communications and especially in relation to the climate crisis, I think will be a really interesting episode and obviously, just outside of the UK as well we've also seen the Far Right in France, Austria now has a new Far Right government, in the EU the Greens lost some seats to the Far Right gaining seats as well, so it's really, really weird, interesting territory at the moment.
Dickon: Great way to set the scene here. It’s weird. Italy, Germany massive gains, UK madness.
Sam: Yeah. With the UK specifically, talking about politics, Labour won, which was seen as a as a win for the Left. But what actually happened is that the political landscape got even more fractured.
So, the traditional party that has been in charge of the last 14 years, which is the Tory party, a lot of those voters went to the Far Right. So, if anything, the UK has become more fractured.
Dickon: During a conversation we had recently for the Communicating Climate Change on-demand e-learning course now available on the Creatives for Climate Community Hub, you mentioned that you'd previously launched campaigns that specifically took inspiration from the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and the pro-Brexit Vote Leave campaign. Why did you think they might have something to offer?
Sam: The rhetoric around those campaigns is obviously something that we didn't take inspiration from, obviously, because it's dangerous and it's racist and it's horrible. So, I'll give you some context. A client that we worked with in the past was the UK charity called The Commitment. That was a politically neutral campaign, and basically what it was designed to do is receive one sentence from voters across the UK, share them with the local MPs to try and influence policy changes in their constituency, around why they cared about the climate and why they cared about the environment.
So, we developed quite a complex ecosystem of ads and audiences on paid social to appeal to both the left and the right and used audience segmentation techniques from Britain Talks Climate, which is a really great audience segmentation tool, specifically in the UK. If anybody hasn't checked that out, I'd highly recommend it. And in the end we achieved over 12,000 commitments across the UK. So it was a great success.
But going back to Trump and Brexit, both of those campaigns use communications to win against the odds, which I think is really important, something to recognise. So, you have to be quite an incredibly naive marketer to think there's nothing to be learned from the strategies both campaigns actually employed.
So, we didn't obviously look to inspiration from the messaging of those campaigns, more so the ways of reaching disengage communities, which in our case was to learn more about why they cared about the climate crisis. We didn't have as much budget as like the the Trump campaign, but I'll give you an example: So, in the Trump campaign specifically, his director of the Trump campaign is called Brad Pascal. I've got his name down here. And he said, quote, “On an average day, we would have make 50,000 to 60,000 ads changing little things such as the language, words, colours, changing things because certain people didn't like a green button or they liked a blue button better and some people like the word donate over contribute,” and so there was like an immense learning that they did and it was quite innovative thing. And the Brexit campaign did a similar thing as well.
We kind of looked at the inspiration for engaging disengaged communities and that's what we did. Obviously, we didn't have that much budget, but we A/B tested extensively and our paid media campaigns that we constructed were totally neutral. And it turned out the engagements from conservative voters actually became more important for our cause and that the climate crisis and the nature crisis isn't specifically an issue that the Left cares about.
So we found issues the the Right cared about, they were more interested in, like, local preservation of green spaces, where the Left was more interested in the future of their children. So, it was really interesting because obviously the climate conversation is seen as like a leftist thing. But when you talk about conservation, I mean the Conservatives, it's the name of their party, right?
The ways that we took inspiration from those campaigns is really understanding audiences. And how to appeal to audiences, how to speak to them on a level that really engaged them. And I think that was, at the time, something that the climate conversation didn't really have, they didn't really have that advanced level of campaign sophistication to reach those audiences.
Dickon: Ultimately, and contrary to the expectations of many people, and as you sort of suggested in the answer to the last question, both of those campaigns were successful. What were the key communication strategies that made them so effective?
Sam: Well, I think apart from the obvious, like advanced learnings that they're able to learn from paid media strategies, it was obviously just the insecurities of their audiences, which unfortunately was immigration that was whipped up at a convenient time as a political tool to supercharge electorate on the Right. Those feelings disenchanted and disengagement. I mean, if you look to Trump, I mean, that was like, “Let's build a wall,” “Let's build a wall” was incredibly effective.
For Brexit. It was famous for engaging disillusioned voters who had adopted anti-immigrant views. I think we all remember that famous Brexit bus that was promising to reinvest £350 million back into the NHS each week.
So, really I mean the key communication strategies there that have made them so effective was their message, in that led them to appeal to disengaged people, which I think if you talk about the climate crisis, there are a lot of disengaged people in that climate conversation too.
Dickon: How did these campaigns leverage emotions and personal identity to build a strong connection with their supporters?
Sam: We often see it, so much with the Far Right, that the focus is on the anti immigration. It's constantly uses the wedge in the wheel to gain influence. So, like statistics such as the numbers flooding into our countries or knife crime or pedophile gangs, that’s specifically, I'm not too sure about the European context, but in the UK, those three topics specifically are ones that always come up. And they're repeated in certain types of media as well.
They are often cited to incite rage and hatred, and ultimately enough passion so people go out and vote. Like essentially, that's what it is. It's like how how much can we really enrage people to take action? And obviously that's not positive. It's horrible, but it is an emotion. They are kind of receiving an emotional response and it does rile people up effectively.
There's always surface level concerns, and they're never going into the true detail of the reasons why these crises might be happening, such as poverty by design, or crime rates per capita. So, like a great example, we've got Notting Hill Carnival in the UK, a couple of stats around that, in 2024 over two million people attended, and there was 275 arrests, that's like 0.014% of people who were arrested. And in contrast, Leeds Music Festival, which is a popular music festival in the north of England, which is much more mixed, there were 78 arrests from 100,000 people, so that's 0.07%. So it's 5 or 6 times more dangerous, yet one is labelled and seen as much more dangerous than the other. And there's always like a media frenzy and police doing big announcements about Notting Hill Carnival. And it's always seen as exceptionally violent, which is rooted in racism.
When it comes to kind of resonating with audiences, it's really insidious stuff, really. And that's why the Far Right is so dispicable.
Dickon: Rage is an interesting one that you kind of pinpoint that as something that has got people out, got people riled up enough to go and vote. Because I think rage is the response that a lot of people have in response to climate. So, why do you think we perhaps don't see the same response on climate issues as we as we do from from these other issues?
Sam: Well, I I think there's an argument that we should. We should see it as rage. I mean, my own journey in terms of creating Kibbo Kift agency and doing this work was fear that this world is changing and nobody's doing anything about it. And we need to tell better stories.
So I mean, there's always an interesting kind of conversation in climate comes around, should we be leading with messages of hope? I think sometimes fear and anxiety sometimes is a useful tool when it comes to creating action. Sometimes.
We obviously see it in the far right in in the worst sense possible. But when it comes to climate conversations, there's always often like we have to be quite hopeful. When every single bit of news that we see on major political issues is always pretty negative and it's and it's hard to remain optimistic, right?
I don't know where I currently sit on that, but my own personal feelings is that, I think fear and rage and that kind of wanting to go out and campaign and make a difference, I think we do need more of that. I mean you saw it with Black Lives Matter, which is like a real transformative moment for a lot of people. We saw a lot of rage with that. How do you inspire motivational acts using fear or negative emotions, essentially?
I think there’s also the conversation around like the Global South and the Global North and our responses to climate as well, right? So in the Global South, people are living that right now. That's not something that they have the chance to react to or think about, whereas we have the chance to think about it, ruminate on it, because we're not seeing the immediate impacts right now. So I suppose there are different levels of the human reaction to the climate crisis, aren’t there?
Dickon: I mean there is a Category 5 hurricane hitting Florida right now. So we are feeling it. But whether or not we connect the dots or not, maybe is another thing. And that's the Trump base.
Sam: There was a famous meme that was going around over the last couple of days and he was kind of calling wind “Bullshit”, which I think was really hilarious. And obviously that resurfaced now. But yeah, I mean, going back to Trump and examining his ad campaigns that we used as kind of semi inspiration back in the day.
His whole campaign and structure is obviously all about feeding off the fear and the anxieties of disenchanted people and disconnected people across the US, right? And I remember vividly a sponsored ad from the Trump campaign, where there was the old white woman in her home and there was a shadowy black figure with the crowbar attempting to break into a house, and it ended with a message that Hillary would let this happen if you vote for her.
When you see that it's so disgusting, it's really horrible. But they are the ads that were really successful and they were appealing to loads of people, and they were spending a lot of money on those ads, so they were working.
Even if we go a bit further back, right and and we look at how the the Nazis came to power. I mean they appealed to the disenchantment left behind from policies following World War One, the Treaty of Versailles and reparations, and they used those as the reasons why the economy was failing and promised to make Germany strong again. That kind of phrase, what does that remind you of?
So there are certain parallels to here, with how Trump weaponized Obamacare, and the Republican handling of the Mexican border, and the Nazis obviously had Hitler as the figurehead and the propaganda machine with Goebbels running behind it. But they uniquely took advantage of German disenchantment to rally support for communities and scapegoated Jews as subhuman. And the main part of the problem.
Like, I know there's a big, fiery debate at the moment about whether people can compare Trump with Hitler. But I think if there are some parallels to the strategies that he's trying to use, I think.
Dickon: Can you explain the importance of message framing as used in these campaigns? How were complex issues simplified into compelling narratives that were both memorable and shareable?
Sam: We touched on it earlier on, I think slogans and catch phrases, they permeate through campaigns and to audiences. They really do do a great job of doing that. So, they're simply just more memorable and they have been used forever in, like, a political context. It's not a new thing to use campaign slogans and catch phrases.
So when you create a slogan you develop like a cult-like devotion for audiences to rally behind like regardless of their real isolation in society. And I was thinking about this a bit deeper as well, it's possibly the first example of meme culture before the Internet came along, using catchphrases and slogans, right? And that's the way to get your point succinctly across. to audiences. It's a great communication tool.
I made a a little list of some of the the slogans that stood out for me over the years. “Let’s take back control” was the big Brexit one. It had universal appeal because like if you think about it, if you just said that without any context, who wouldn't want more control? You want more control, that's a good thing. But in the context of the Brexit campaign was using it as it was obviously rooted in racism. “Stop the boats,” another one that everybody remembers now.
The biggest one probably of recent time is “Make America Great Again.” And if you think about like how much that has a universal appeal again, like, who wouldn't want a great America if you're American? But I think it was specifically interesting because they've commercialised it so much like this magro caps, there's magro tops. There was Kanye West wearing a maggot app. It became its own phenomenon as a slogan, which I think has done so. So much positive work for Trump. It's a great campaign that sticks in your mind, right? It's a great slogan. Personal favourite was eat the rich. And this is something that I always say it actually came from John, Jack Russo. And it when it came from when the people shall have nothing more to eat that will eat the rich. That's where that comes from. I think these slogans really do mean something. And another old school one as well. The equality and fraternity. It's French one. Everyone that I've just listed that I think everybody, everyone of your listeners will know that. So I think that just goes to show how effective these catch phrases, slogans in the mean like qualities they have are really effective and they really work.
Dickon: Yeah, the. Alt for Nautica, like everything for Norway. But then they have a very different relationship to nationalism than we do. You should see it on the 17th of may, their national day in England. If you saw that many flags. You'd walk the other way.
Sam: In England, then you're going down the street and you're sitting on flags. For me, that's a I'm not going anywhere near that.
Dickon: Caroline Lucas, who was Brighton MP for Forever one of her things as she left government or maybe shortly after she left. Was encouraging young people to embrace being English again, to kind of take it back so that it wasn't that which I thought was a really interesting thing and kind of falls into the the boundaries of this conversation.
What lessons can climate communicators learn from these campaigns when it comes to mobilising supporters and encouraging active participation?
Sam: Campaigns that we've worked on recently, that's called the Campbell, which is the climate in Nature, Bill, which is just today got passed into the contention to be passed into Parliament, which is absolutely brilliant. We worked with them to recreate that famous political advertisements that were once like anti labour and anti immigration. We flip them to totally to change the message for climate in nature. So this is speaking to like a specific crowd who are really invested in. Someone quickly understand the reference, but there was like a famous Tory poster back in the day that was named like Labour isn't working and there was a line of people snaking in a queue. Lined up for the unemployment office in the image and it was a really strong piece of work and piece of art direction. So we kept the same line but replaced the people with endangered animals and species and flipped the motto to nature isn't working as opposed to Labour isn't working. And instead of the unemployment office there was like a. For extinction. And that all the animals were kind of heading towards when it comes to kind of active participation. I think we've got to say something in terms of the role of social media and the reason why I mentioned the last campaign is that they did a really great job of mobilising people on dark social. These are WhatsApp constantly and it's really great to see so many people riled up on WhatsApp groups. Similarly, I mentioned the UK riots earlier this summer and it was a known source that they were. Getting all of their information organisation through WhatsApp communities as opposed to anything else you saw like Sky News reporters constantly reference whatsapps. And there was journalists that were infiltrating the WhatsApp groups, which I think is like really interesting talking about the impact of social media on like mobilisation of groups. I always remember the terrorist attack in the backland in Paris. That was the first ever time I remember getting my news from Twitter. 1st, as opposed to the TV, now it's like people are are kind of sharing. Work and mobilising on these dark social groups, and I know X has. Of gone through a bit of a of a change recently with Elon buying it and and the kind of far right has found at home on XA bit more now. So I think the role of social media to organise people on Whipple pay and Whipple promotion is is really something that we're seeing in real time now. On the flip side, in terms of the climate con side, like I'm part of seven or eight different slack channels, which are all dedicated to different climate groups and gatherings and kind of thinking about like different forums and stuff that I'm part of as well. So I think there is a future that I think essentially social media is becoming harder to reach people. On. But the real strength in terms of how do you mobilise people nowadays is through how strongly engages your off channel social media activity.
Dickon: Are there any ethical boundaries that climate communicators should be aware of or take into consideration when borrowing strategies from these kinds of campaigns?
Sam: Yeah, I think obviously, I mean don't lean on far right rhetoric and populism within your campaigns. That's not the right thing to do. But I think in instead it's like maybe looking at ways that you can engage hard to reach audiences on topics and make them relatable. Really. That is the key thing when we're examining like strategies from the right is that they do that really. And the left doesn't. Sometimes the left is often in conflict with each other in terms of what the right kind of messaging is and the right ways to do things, and I feel like sometimes we overthink that too much and that blunt progress and progression, whereas the right have a very clear motto and motive and they go for it. So yeah, I'd probably say obviously don't lean into the fire rhetoric or recycle any of that messaging, but think about the. Less structured than the ways audiences are reacting to them, especially this enhanced people. Because I know we talk about you have to engage like 20% of our population and then the rest will do its job. But again, we're not seeing that. Work. A lot of people interested in the climate space now a lot of people are concerned, but I don't really see it progressing as rapidly as it should be. So I do think we need to think of different ways to involve communities that are a bit more disengaged or a bit more on the fence about climate. Sometimes in the climate comms world, we do grapple with whether we should be telling a messenger of hope or a message of despair. I think it must depend on the context as well the. Depend on what campaign you work in towards, but you could argue that both have a have a really good effective output. But what is the one that's going to take people over the line? Even you mentioned the the hurricane that's happening in Florida right now, I wonder how many people at the end of it will think it back to climate change and be like we need to make a change based off the destruction that we've seen. Something tells me that that won't be a major take away for people that I'll be more focused on economic damage.
Dickon: Could you give an idea of what you mean by A to?
Sam: Classic example. The communities that I'm from. So third generation immigrant audiences, people that are working class, they don't have a real urgency to even think about the climate because they're too busy paying their bills and looking after their children. And when you've got things like fast fashion and your kids need new clothes like that's not really going to be a consideration for you in terms of. Consume ethically, so really I think it's like an awareness issue. How can you appeal to those community? It is in a way that they're going to understand it a bit more and it's gonna be at the level and they've got all these other concerns swirling around in their heads, right. And I think that's ultimately a really difficult thing to do, something that I kind of always I'm trying to champion is linking it back to heritage and history. Right. And I mean, I'm third generation Indian immigrant and my family were from the partition side of India when that happened. Try to link it back to colonialism and like what's our. Immigrants from that part of the world and then linking it back to our roots as a reliant agriculture and rely on the environment and the climate and being in nature, right. And that's something that is kind of taken away from us. As for a generation, immigrants to the UK, what I'm grateful to be here, I think it's a reconnection of your history and your roots in finding out who you are. Then all of a sudden that kind of sphere. More of an impact on people and it gives them a bit of a reason to question like Oh yeah, this is how you connect the dots. And similarly like I believe if you're talking about politics for martial arts communities, especially in the last UK election, I think all of them should have voted for green on policy level. That was the only one that was appealing to them the most. And we didn't see that happen and we didn't see that cut through. So yeah, again, I'd probably try to frame it in a bit of a different way where we're talking about different links and ultimately the working class people that are that say this as a working class person myself aren't really going to be bothered in the corruption of the foster fuel industry or they're not going to know what 1000 tonnes of carbon looks like. I don't know what 1000 tonnes of carbon looks like, but we cite it and we we. So yeah, I think it's just thinking of novel ways to approach that conversation. I think the example of that using humour to communicate the climate crisis is a very good one. I always go back to nature as an artist. That's. What I did with the UN and that's such a brilliant campaign and way to merge 2 worlds together, I'm always looking at those examples of the ones that like really stand out to me in terms of really effective climate communications that are including and going beyond existing audiences and reaching out to new people.
Dickon: What's the single most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our communication and dev?
Sam: It's probably not going to be in relation to to the far right, but I think something that I see often and a lot is there's no solid call to action from campaigns that we that we see in the climate space. So like it's always something that's kind of hard to engage with. So it's a bit of news that you read and then you feel angry or you feel ****** *** and you feel like the world is crashing down and coming to an end. Whereas I feel like having 1/4. Campaign. If it is, sign a petition. If it is, write a letter to your MP. If it is kind of listen to this music on Spotify and you'll be helping restore nature like I think stuff like that really really helps people and it grounds campaigns in a top tangible call to action where people can interact with. That is how you kind of make a really effective campaign also from a marketing side. You get to explore the measurement as well. So you can see tangibly the impact that your campaign is having on people by a solid metric. But yeah, that's one thing that we see people come into us and we're always trying to bake in a call to action that people can interact with into campaigns.
Dickon: On the flip side of that, what's the biggest mistake that you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues?
Sam: I think this is one that we can tie back to the far right as well, which is really understanding your audience right and not only understanding them, but how to reach them as well. We do PR as like basically 75% of what we do, which is media relations, and then we also do some paid ads. Obviously, as the campaign that I mentioned earlier with the commitment as well and a lot of the time we get clients coming to us or potential clients coming to us saying that they want Apr campaign and we want coverage in ** and ** and a lot of the time we have to push back and we have to say like well, do you really understand who your audience? You're trying to reach him and engage with them 'cause. If so, Pierre might not be the best thing to do. Pierre is a really traditional way of reaching people through media publications, right? Whereas if you did it on paid social where? Which is like a really, really tangible outputs. Maybe that is a much more effective way to reach people and gain influence. So I think for me the the biggest thing is kind of knowing the fundamental differences between marketing channels and really deeply understanding that the behaviour of audiences on web, they're seeing information or receiving information, a really good example is that we've tried to develop a bit of a strategy internally around sub. On how do we engage different journalists on sub stack because they're really influential at micro level, even if we've got like a few 1000 followers, they're all really engaged people. So we're playing with that at the moment. How do we make our kind of outreach for clients through sub stack more effective? And we've also just launched a new channel on Reddit. So if we get any really great piece of coverage, we always go and post it on Reddit and that's where you see conversations happening and people are voting it and stuff like that as well on the appropriate threads. So it's all about kind of these little ways to think like with this campaign that you're thinking of who is. Real person and and what kind of media do they consume on a daily basis? And I think what often that doesn't happen.
Dickon: It was wicked to catch up with Sam, but what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and apply to your own work? For me, it was Sam's observation that the right have done a better job, generally of appealing to the values of their audience. This is something that seems to come up time and time again in climate communications. It is often dropped the ball when it comes to the frames, calls to action and the language that they employ. In fact, this is something I explored in the first communicating climate change call in show. I'll add a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to check that out. Next up, slogans. What are the powerful slogans of the climate movement? What are our unifying, all-encompassing tag lines, the messages and mantras we can all get behind? On the whole, I think these are sorely missing. You only have to take one look at a nearby climate demonstration to see the multitude of messages on show, from gender to Gaza, and everything in between. There are umpteen banners to get behind, but no single slogan, no core catch phrase that speaks to everyone. Each of those splinter issues risks alienating this or that. Group meanwhile, our opponents rally behind their unified front. Maybe the best I can think of from recent times is the idea of Earth for all that seems to take a lot of the boxes we're talking about, at least at the top line message level. But what other widely appealing slogans or tag lines could we imagine for this movement? Finally, it's that I'm crossing my fingers that the rhetoric of the right doesn't win yet again in this week's US election. And if it does, there couldn't be a greater sign that we need to address the communication crisis that Sam pointed to. Either way, our future depends on us doing so, so that's what I'll be taking with me. But how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to Sam Narr for sharing his time and insight with the show, it was great. You can find some links to relevant resources in the show. Thanks also to you for listening to communicating climate change. If you enjoyed this episode, why not leave it a rating or a review? Your feedback not only helps to shine a light on the guests and themes that resonate with you the most, but also boost visibility. Meaning the series reaches more people expanding the community and driving the conversation forward. You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts, or by subscribing so you never miss out. For more on the themes explored in this episode, I can recommend my conversations with Florencia Lujani on engaging the persuadables. With Nick Oldridge on using comedy as a vehicle for climate. And with Iminza Mbwaya on the UN Sounds Right campaign.
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