Marketers offered ‘dream team’ to tackle world’s woes

networkMarketers are being offered the chance to work alongside an industry “dream team” – including Ogilvy UK’s Rory Sutherland, Direct Line’s Mark Evans and IBM’s Caroline Taylor – as part of the launch activity for a new professional network set up to tackle the big issues of the day.

MarketingKind is being launched with the highbrow aim of “strengthening the role marketing can play in better advancing humankind, through outcome-oriented online gatherings and practical collaboration”.

As part of the campaign, conceived and executed by agency HeyHuman, the network has set up an eBay auction, which will give the highest bidder the chance to work on a new brief of “How can we get businesses to see the candidate, not the disability?”

Bidders name their price across a ten-day auction, starting on October 15, and the winner will get a seat at the table with Sutherland & Co.

MarketingKind founder Paul Skinner said: “Once they’ve left education and all its associated support mechanisms, adults affected by disabilities want to access employment perhaps more than any other group – yet appallingly high numbers of them are never given a chance to show what they can do.

“Some 94% of adults with registered learning disabilities, for example, never access any employment at all. The UK was criticised by the UN for lack of progress on this issue, and it’s time to do something about it. How can we change recruitment and induction behaviours in businesses to correct this?

“MarketingKind is a chance for marketers to step outside of their day jobs and work together with their peers from across marketing, together with pioneering change-makers, to look outwards at the most pressing problems facing us locally and globally, and build practical solutions to them together.”

All money raised from the auction goes directly to Sky Badger; a charity that restores fun and adventure to families with children affected by disabilities across the UK, and whose founder is leading a task force to enhance employment prospects for adults affected by disability.

The full line up is:
– Ogilvy UK vice-chair Rory Sutherland; The Spectator‘s Wiki Man, and author of Alchemy
– Direct Line Group managing director of marketing and digital Mark Evans
– IBM Global Markets chief marketing officer Caroline Taylor
– MediaCom chief transformation officer Sue Unerman; author of Belonging
– HeyHuman chief executive Neil Davidson
– Love Home Swap managing director Célia Pronto
– Strategist John Grant; author of Greener Marketing

MarketingKind will strive to tackle some of the biggest issues in society today, including climate change, social isolation and poverty.

Davidson added: “Marketers are professional problem solvers, but many of us feel there’s more we could be doing to do good for the world at large. Our launch goes all-out to address this. We’ve come up with a proposition that injects something unusual into the everyday: using eBay to bid for the time and expertise of some of our industry’s biggest brains. We believe the result will be brilliant ideas that help make the world a better place.

“MarketingKind gives members the chance to genuinely make a real difference – to come together and solve big issues in a tangible way. We’ve got real problems, and we can fix them. This bid is the perfect way to set out MarketingKind’s stall, and I can’t wait to see people put their money where their mouths are.”

The MarketingKind bid goes live on eBay this week>

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