When Nazia Went to Brazil

40 days in Brazil…

Nazia Hussain + TIE + INATA + Boca do Lixo Recife, March 2011

Hello.

I’m Nazia, and I work as a planner at Ogilvy in London.

I run a bit of the agency called Cultural Strategy, which is all about using cultural anthropology to understand people’s lives better.

Being a TIE volunteer in early 2011 was deeply special. I’d never been to Brazil before, so I was keen to throw myself into a whole new cultural experience. I grew up in Bangladesh and believe that the best kind of development is the kind that delivers and leaves skills, rather than taking away local jobs.

That’s why volunteering my skills appealed so much.

And I love children. Living in lots of emerging markets has made me a firm believer in education as the thing that will make a difference, the education of young girls in particular.

So for me to go out and work for a grassroots charity aiming to raise children’s literacy levels in Brazil by giving of my communications skills was a perfect fit.

Who made it happen?

Philippa at TIE has been working with WPP for a few years now, and I was lucky enough to be granted funding for a TIE placement by WPP. I was also heavily backed by Ogilvy both by being given time off, management level support, and also local support through our Brazilian offices.

None of it would have happened without all of these wonderful people.

Jon Steel and Jeremy Bullmore at WPP; Philippa White at TIE; John Shaw and Russell Davies at Ogilvy

The project in a nutshell.

Boca do Lixo are, to use Philippa’s words, ‘as grassroots as it gets’.

They are a cultural movement that aims to raise children’s literacy in one of the poorest corners of Brazil. The kids they help live mostly in the favelas of Peixinhos, just outside Recife.

They run a free library and educational street events (like the one here) that they want the Peixinhos community to know about, support and engage with.

They needed to be heard.

So that’s what I went out to do.

My merry band.

All TIE communications volunteers are given a local agency to work with for the duration of the project. This means that you get the creative, planning and account support you need to get the communications project off the ground.

I was paired with INATA, an ‘experimental advertising agency’ run by one of the local universities in Recife. The kids had bundles of energy and we had a great relationship.

They were so optimistic and passionate – working with them made me lose ten years’ worth of cynicism.

We had our challenges.

Clients who thought they knew what they wanted but realised quickly that they didn’t.

Clients who didn’t (really) believe in marketing to begin with – normal in the grassroots development world.

A client and account director (me) without a language in common!

An agency partner of twenty-one-year-olds with no experience in communications.

Four teeny tiny weeks to build a brand from scratch and begin to communicate it.

But we worked through them with ‘valores humanos’ One of the very first things we did during our kickoff training day was to capture the values with which we all wanted to work with each other.

Collectively, these then became the values of the project. Although this felt a bit touchy-feely to me at first, in fact it was one of the most humbling lessons I learned from working in Brazil – that no matter how difficult and stressful times get, treating people as human beings remains the most important thing of them all.

Perseverance, Collaboration, Respect, Teamwork, Listening, Thinking, Wisdom, Love, Motivation, Honesty, Responsibility, Empathy, Solidarity and Openness.

The key to success: the Project Plan This was probably the most important bit of the project. In the very first week, I got everyone together to decide how we were going to do it, and the resulting Project Plan set out, to the hour, where everyone was meant to be at any given time over the next month and what they were meant to be doing.

With so many players involved (and so many of them never having worked in a professional context before!) perfect project planning was key.

It meant that I could forget about being accountzilla for the rest of the month since everyone had the same masterplan to refer to.

Very useful indeed.

The Project Plan in Action Roughly, it was a communications development project squeezed into four weeks, so not at all unlike a pitch.

Week 1 – research Week 2 – analysis and creative briefing Week 3 – late nights and utter chaos Week 4 – pulling through.

Our working sessions at INATA were full of laughter, lots of hugs, and despite the occasional frustration, always extremely collaborative.

The brand challenge.

In our first prolonged discussion session with the client where we sat picking apart their brief, we quickly came to two major conclusions.

1. Boca do Lixo’s key product, the library, Biblioteca Multicultural Nascedouro (BMN) was a great product. It just wasn’t a brand.

2. The clients, Boca do Lixo, had a quite a confused notion of who their audience were. They were trying to be everything to everyone, and were in danger of confusing their multiple audiences through unfocused communications. So our very first task was to make clear that while the library was for the children, our communications needn’t be – in fact, they would be much more effective targeted at the adults who were the real decision makers, the parents and teachers of Peixinhos.

That settled, our challenge was clear. We had on our hands a great product – the free BMN library at Peixinhos was an obviously valuable counterpart to the extremely basic schooling provided by the underfunded local public schools of the favelas. The Biblioteca was a space of learning, creativity, and importantly, safety. But it was haunted by the negative perceptions of poverty and violence surrounding the area of Peixinhos, and mired in the despair often felt by the parents when it came to their childrens’ futures.

Our thinking.

We knew that the issue we had to solve was relevance. When it came to education as a whole, everyone, from the poorest illiterate parents to the district school administrators, agreed its immense importance. But when it came to the free library’s role in their children’s lives, they were less clear. We had to give the Biblioteca a clear, relevant role in the lives of the Peixinhos community if we were going to increase visits to the library. They just couldn’t see the value of library visits in lives that seemed already so fraught. We established that this was the key cultural tension we needed to resolve.

Then we moved onto the brand itself. Time and time again, the clients had told us that the Biblioteca was so much more than just a library. And spending time with the little children of the favela as they laughed and cried and whooped their way through the story-telling and the games, the crafts and the songs, we realised that indeed it was. It was a creative space in which education was considered holistically, where enjoyment and engagement were key. Above all, it was a place that children came to to lose themselves in wonderful stories through books and readings – stories that made them dream about their own futures.

From there, it was a clear that we needed to communicate the value of the kind of education that the Biblioteca provided. So we decided to concentrate on the incredible power that storytelling has – in teaching children life lessons, in allowing them to dream, and through imagination, letting them turn today’s dreams into tomorrow’s reality.

In essence, this was The big ideaL™ in practice.

The big ideaL™ is Ogilvy’s proprietary planning tool to help uncover brands’ points of view on the world. www.thebigideal.com

Cultural Tension: Living in an area so poor and lacking in opportunity, it’s hard to see what tangible value a free library will bring to the lives of the children in my community.

Brand’s Best Self: The BMN is much more than just a library. It’s a creative space in which children come to live in stories – stories that inspire them to dream about their own futures.

BMN believes the world would be a better place if we believed in the power of storytelling to transform children’s futures.

The work so far This poster on the right was in effect the key visual for the campaign. The headline reads ‘Once upon a time…’ and below, ‘Children dreamed, and wrote their own stories’.

The little girl in the poster is actually one of the girls who loves going to the library, her ‘dreams’ representative of all the things kids said they wanted to be – ballet dancers, doctors, astronauts.

The parents we showed it to found very emotive as a clear call to action. In a place as robbed of hope as Peixinhos, it reminded them that books, and learning, can indeed open the door to a better future. It gave the library a clear reason for being.

The identity of the library.

Testament to the confusion as to the library’s intended target, their logo had had a colourful, child-like quality to appeal to the kids themselves. We quickly realised that the people we needed to ‘sell’ to weren’t the children, but the parents and the teachers who could see little point in the free library, as well as to district and state level authorities who could help their cultural movement grow. It needed to be professional, demonstrating expertise, and clear about what they did. Our resulting logo was a much needed evolution that came with a powerful new tagline, Contando historias para transformar realidades. Telling stories that change realities.

The client reaction.

‘We now finally understand the power of marketing’ ‘We love the thinking, the chosen route and the work – but most importantly, the people of Peixinhos love it’

‘You helped us see things about ourselves that we could never have identified on our own’

‘This will have a huge impact for years to come’

‘This has been an incredibly transformative experience for the whole organisation, forcing us to look really hard at ourselves to see what we’re about’

The story spread.

As interest grew in around Peixinhos in what we were doing, we gave interviews and spread the word around all our contacts.

The result was a full article in one of Recife’s three major broadsheets, highlighting how the expertise of Ogilvy London was helping the poorest communities in Peixinhos.

It was fantastic coverage that gave the Biblioteca a great boost in their public profile.

My biggest source of support.

The Mascaro family, who I was lucky enough to live with for four weeks, were probably the single biggest influence on my experience in Brazil.

Simply put, they opened my eyes to a whole new way of living – through their belief in togetherness, trust, laughter, creativity and positivity in facing life. I was seamlessly woven into their family and introduced regularly as their second daughter, and when I left, it was with a very deep and special understanding of what it means to be Brazilian.

In retrospect, I can see I learned many a valuable lesson.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

The power of positivity: believing it will all work out is fundamentally more important than whether or not it actually does.

The power of demonstration: The best way to battle misperceptions is by making a tangible difference.

Acceptance: I learned to accept varying levels of skill with equanimity by remembering that people have more to offer than professional skill.

The power of silent observation: I learned more from living with the Mascaro family for four weeks than I would have done by reading fifty demographic/trend reports on the Brazilian middle class.

Empathy: I learned that all good meetings start and end with hugs.

My blog became my best friend.

It was what I talked to every night when I got home after a hard day’s work on the project.

Getting sympathy, encouragement and votes of confidence from supporters all over the world did wonders to make the whole experience even better.

And finally‌ I learned an enormous amount personally, mainly that the pleasure of experiences like these comes from the giving, not the taking.

Seeing every day the hope and joy in the lives of the kids of the favelas who have so little, I needed no further reminder that happiness is a created state of being, and one that’s entirely up to us.

For further information‌ www.naziagoestobrazil.wordpress.com www.naziahussain.com www.theinternationalexchange.co.uk Nazia Hussain Ogilvy & Mather 10 Cabot Square London E14 4QB United Kingdom +44 7917 829297 nazia.hussain@ogilvy.com