The Sound of Silence

Some moments in your career stay with you. Not necessarily because you’ve won an award (I certainly never have), delivered a particularly successful campaign or impressed the board. Sometimes it’s simply because something you’ve worked on has genuinely moved people – including me.

I remember one of those moments very clearly.

We were at an NTT DATA company town hall, showing a video we’d created as part of a new Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) campaign. I’d been involved in the project from the beginning, working with some very talented people to develop the story and bring it to life. When the video finished, there was complete silence. Then someone in the audience said, “Wow”, and people started clapping.I remember the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. Even now, thinking about it brings back that feeling. It remains one of the proudest moments of my marketing career.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Not my usual territory

Most of my career has been spent in B2B technology marketing. Product launches, demand generation, content, campaigns, sales enablement. The usual suspects. DEI wasn’t exactly my specialist subject, although inclusion has a personal significance for me. My daughter has autism, so I’ve seen first-hand how important it is for people to be understood, accepted and given the opportunity to fulfil their potential. Perhaps that made me a little more invested in this particular assignment than I might otherwise have been.

While I was freelancing at NTT DATA in the UK, Clare Stephens joined the organisation as its new VP of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Clare had an ambitious brief, a marketing budget and, as luck would have it, me to work with.

So we got to it.

The challenge was an interesting one. How do you take something as important, complex and potentially sensitive as DEI and turn it into a story that resonates with people across a large organisation? More importantly, how do you make it feel like something everyone can be part of, rather than another corporate initiative handed down from above? We didn’t want another worthy piece of corporate communication that people would politely acknowledge before getting on with their day. We wanted something that would make them think, perhaps challenge a few assumptions and, ideally, stay with them.

Finding the right people

One of my first jobs was to find a creative agency that could help us achieve that, and after considering our options, we chose Rooster Punk. I’d love to claim that all the creative brilliance that followed came from me, but it didn’t. Rooster Punk have some seriously talented people, and working with them was one of the real pleasures of the project.

Clare brought the DEI expertise and the vision. I owned and managed the marketing project, working closely with the agency on the strategy, creative direction, content and narrative. Rooster Punk brought their strategic thinking, storytelling skills and creative execution. There was plenty of discussion, debate and creative development along the way, but we shared an understanding of what we wanted to achieve.

Out of that collaboration came Creating Inclusion Together.

It was a simple idea with an important message. Inclusion isn’t something that can be delivered by a department or a policy. It’s something everyone contributes to through the way they behave, communicate and treat the people around them.

Finding the human story

One of the things I liked most about the creative direction was that we resisted the temptation to make it complicated. DEI comes with its own vocabulary, and while much of that language has an important purpose, it isn’t necessarily the best way to connect with a broad audience. We wanted to get beneath the terminology and talk about something more fundamental: the simple human desire to be respected, understood and heard. There was a passage in the narrative we developed that captured this beautifully:

“Together, we’ll create an organisation that will never miss out on a brilliant idea,
That someone couldn’t voice, or that others didn’t hear.”

I still love those words.

Think about how many good ideas might never see the light of day because someone doesn’t feel confident enough to speak up, or because the people around them aren’t prepared to listen. It’s a human issue, certainly, but there’s also a compelling business argument. If you employ talented people, why wouldn’t you want to create an environment where all of them feel able to contribute? That thinking shaped the campaign narrative and ultimately the film, which became one of the most memorable pieces of creative work I’ve had the pleasure of being involved in.

Bringing the story to life

The project was about considerably more than producing a video. Together, we developed the wider campaign platform, messaging, creative materials and a framework that NTT DATA could use to communicate the initiative across the organisation. But the video was something special.

It’s difficult to explain why certain pieces of creative work affect you more than others. Sometimes everything just comes together. The narrative, the imagery, the music, the pacing. Each element works on its own, but together they create something with a much greater impact. This was one of those times.

What I particularly liked was that the film didn’t tell people what to think. It invited them to reflect on their own experiences and consider those of the people around them. There was no finger-wagging or attempt to make anyone feel guilty, just a reminder that we all have a part to play in creating a more inclusive environment. Anyone who’s worked in marketing will recognise the feeling of becoming so immersed in a project that it’s difficult to see it through anyone else’s eyes. You spend months reviewing creative concepts, debating individual words, managing stakeholders and worrying about deadlines. Eventually, you put the finished work in front of an audience and discover whether all that effort has connected with anyone.

That town hall was our moment of truth – and the reaction told me something no campaign dashboard ever could.

The sound of silence

I’ve worked on a lot of marketing projects over the years. Some have delivered impressive commercial results, some have helped launch products or open new markets, and others have simply been good, solid pieces of work that I’m pleased to have my name associated with.

This one was different.

It took me outside my usual professional territory and gave me the opportunity to work on something that mattered to me personally. It brought together people with different skills and perspectives, including Clare and the talented team at Rooster Punk, and reminded me how rewarding a genuinely collaborative creative process can be.

I’m proud of the part I played, but equally proud of what we achieved together – as a team. There’s something rather appropriate about that, given the name of the campaign.

I’ve loved Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence for as long as I can remember. There’s something extraordinary about the lyrics and the way they explore our ability to communicate without necessarily connecting, to hear words without really listening, and to become so absorbed in the noise around us that we miss what other people are trying to say. I’d listened to that song countless times over the years, but I hadn’t really connected it with this project until I started reflecting on what we’d achieved.

We’d spent months working on a campaign about inclusion, about making sure people felt valued and giving everyone the confidence to contribute. At the heart of it was the idea that somewhere in every organisation there are perspectives worth understanding, experiences worth acknowledging and brilliant ideas that might otherwise go unheard.

And sometimes the greatest barrier isn’t the absence of a voice. It’s the absence of someone willing to listen. Which brings me back to that town hall, the film and those extraordinary few seconds after it finished. For all the words we’d written, the conversations we’d had and the creative work we’d produced, the most powerful response came when nobody said anything at all.

And I knew we’d been heard.

With thanks to Clare Stephens, the talented team at Rooster Punk and everyone at NTT DATA who helped bring Creating Inclusion Together to life.

You can also explore NTT DATA’s Creating Inclusion Together programme.