Branding SDGs: Star power blitz & glitz to tell world about UN Global Goals

Seven billion people, seven days and 17 goals. Call it Mission 7717, if you like, or simply Mission 17. Blending glamour, glitz, star shower and snappy story-telling, the staid United Nations, known for pompous well-meaning speeches, has launched an audacious path-breaking campaign to tell the world about its “Global Goals” of weeding out poverty, combating inequality and climate change by 2030.

The campaign kicks off on September 25 when world leaders are expected to affirm and adopt 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets at a summit during the 70^th session of the United Nations General Assembly. The UNGA last week approved a resolution sending the draft ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ to Member States for adoption at the SDG summit in New York. The SDG mission is envisaged as an anthem for renewal of the planet by charting out an action-plan for forging a more equitable and sustainable world for all over the next 15 years.

Only Connect: Tell ALL

In the insanely distracted wired world bristling with thousands of 24×7 channels and incessant chatter, who tells the story better has a better chance to be heard amid all that din and clamour. So, the impresarios of the UN ‘Tell All’ campaign has deftly packaged the bland-sounding Sustainable Development Goals as simply Global Goals, imparting the laudable UN mission directness and universality.

These Global Goals will be relayed incessantly via 101,000 billboards from New York’s Times Square to Piccadilly Circus in London and The Twin Tower in Kuala Lumpur. It will be reinforced by online evangelism by digital giants including Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Yahoo and Tumblr.

Fun, Bright and Interesting

Richard Curtis, the acclaimed British filmmaker chosen by the UN to lead the campaign from the front, showcased his Project Everyone at the UN headquarters in New York on September 4. Curtis, better known for blockbuster hits like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones Diary and Mr Bean, knows what it takes to get the message across in this world of overwhelmingly young people. His campaign, as he says, is “fun, bright, entertaining, and interesting,” and should get eyeballs and mindspace of easily distracted young people. “I was looking forward to 2015 and thought I should do something in order to try and make these new goals much more famous and much more well-known than the Millennium Development Goals were,” Mr Curtis said. “And it came as no surprise to me that as I started to say these things, I found out that so many people that I’d worked with before, so many of the NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and campaigners also felt the same thing.”

UN Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, Cristina Gallach, also underlined the power of celebrity in getting the UN’s overarching message across. “Being famous is absolutely necessary to ensure that [the goals] are implemented,” she said.

The campaign is breath-taking in its scope and is marshalling just about every trick in the repertoire of multifarious communication technologies to make the 17 SDGs acquire the charge of a personal mission in people’s lives. The campaign’s show-stealer will be clearly the global cinema ad, narrated by actor Liam Neeson, which will explain Global Goals in a captivating, de-jargonised way.

March from MDGs to SDGs

The march from MDGs to SDGs has been a long and tortuous one, involving labyrinthine negotiations among UN member states over the last two years. With the UNGA approving the draft ‘2030 Agenda,” the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which contain 169 targets, is set to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), paving the way for the beginning of its implementation on January 1, 2016.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has encapsulated the essence of the SDG agenda. “This is the people’s agenda, a plan of action for ending poverty in all its dimensions, irreversibly, everywhere, and leaving no one behind.”

“Today is the start of a new era. We have travelled a long way together to reach this turning point,” Mr Ban said after the approval of the draft text by the UNGA last week.

The SDGs include, among others, not just ending poverty and economic inequality by 2030, but also ensuring food security and access to water and sanitation. “We are resolved to free the human race within this generation from the tyranny of poverty and want, and to heal and secure our planet for the present and for future generations,” says the SDG outcome document.

The MDGs helped lift over one billion people out of extreme poverty over the last 15 years and improved literacy partially in many developing countries, but they did not substantially mitigate deeply entrenched economic inequality in large parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The SDGs seeks to address structural inadequacies of the MDG template and could prove to be a paradigm shift in the collective global quest to create a more humane and equitable world, free from poverty, deprivation and conspicuous waste.

Author Profile

Manish Chand

Manish Chand is Founder-CEO and Editor-in-Chief of India Writes Network (www.indiawrites.org) and India and World, a pioneering magazine focused on international affairs. He is CEO/Director of TGII Media Private Limited, an India-based media, publishing, research and consultancy company.