Over the last few years, ESG has been the topic of much debate, division and controversy. From political backlash and investors stepping away to greenwashing scandals and tightening regulations, it’s never been far from the headlines.
And it’s not going away any time soon, including in regions like the Middle East, where it is still slowly gaining pace.
ESG literacy, however, remains low, and in the realm of communications, it is often misunderstood.
ESG Mena’s Sal Jafar recently spoke to Boudy Nasrala, the Managing Partner of WonderEight, a global branding and digital agency, to hear about how the communications landscape is evolving and why making ESG accessible is more important than ever.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Boudy, to give our audience a bit of background about the company, walk us through its inception, operations and footprint.
We started 24 years ago, and we do everything around communication and marketing, such as branding, consulting, strategy, marketing, social media, and film production.
My brother and I started very young in Beirut, Lebanon, our first office.
Then we opened in Dubai in 2012, then in London, UK, then in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and in San Francisco, USA, two years ago.
Why San Francisco?
First of all, my brother and partner moved there, and then we saw an opportunity to start learning from the other side of the world.
Since we started, it has opened our eyes to much newer and more modern ways of communication, whether it is on sustainability, on being an aligned company, or on being true to our calling. This has changed the way we’re servicing clients a lot.
Four years ago, we made the bold decision to only service clients who have a positive impact on humans or the planet.
It’s a gradual plan for the next five years, but we’re almost there.
From the first year, we were able to get one of the biggest startups in San Francisco, Climax, which is the future of cheese without milk. It’s real French cheese: Camembert, etc..
With the power of AI, they were able to do precision fermentation and achieve an end result that is not rubbery or made from oils but from real fermentation between different plant-based products, giving you a real cheese that you can even smell.
The second client we were able to help was Switch Foods. It’s the first Emirati plant-based meat company, one of the biggest factories in the UAE, and it’s now backed up by the government.
The amazing thing about Switch is that we saw from the start how dedicated the owner is, how transparent the owner is, and how clean the label is.
As soon as we met them, they not only ended up with a client but also a partner. We invested in equity—it was the same thing for Climax. This helped us to be closer to them and put in the extra effort we needed to without counting the fees, and I’m happy to tell you that we learned a lot about this business when we got clients on board.
We learned how to communicate. We learned how to get the message through. We learned how to create messages that resonate with the consumer.
At Gulfood Green, I’m asking people about ESG, carbon footprint, and sustainability. No one knows how to answer me on this, and they are not to blame.
But I think the communication agencies like us or the vendors that need to create more approachable ways to communicate what we’re doing.
I think there’s still a lot of work to be done by agencies like us to communicate what you know, whether to big corporations or to the end consumer.
So we also decided this year to help an initiative we love, Chapter Zero. It’s a worldwide initiative that teaches corporate management about ESG, and we’re offering our services for free.
What are the biggest challenges you are encountering with regard to ESG branding strategies?
The first one comes from the clients themselves when the client comes to us with this request.
When they come to us to help them with their ESG communication, they have had a bad experience. They think that it’s unachievable, and they have a bad perception of it.
So we’re going back from the marketing management to the upper layers, which hold the power.
That’s the biggest challenge. This is why we are working with people in Chapter Zero to educate these world-level people on knowing that this also has ROI, but it needs time. It’s a long-term plan.
Tell me about the role of social media in promoting ESG. How is it evolving in the Middle East?
Because social media is an accessible medium, anyone can have a phone and create an account, and there’s a lot of false information, so we advise people to follow through when they read an article, go to the source, see the background of who wrote it, and dig deeper.
More broadly, how are you encouraging people to overcome obstacles and persuade them that it is time today, not tomorrow, to start with ESG and sustainability?
First of all, we learn to detect “Inshallah” from “Inshallah”. At WonderEight, we have a very good balance between strategy and execution.
We’re not pure strategists who give you something you can’t execute, and we’re not pure execution without thinking of strategy. We’re in the right sweet spot; that’s why we’re practical.
In our strategy part, we are building our network of investment, so we can also not only do marketing communication for a brand, but also link them to investors at the same time.
We are in talks with lots of VCs and private investors to link them with our clients.
What made us convinced, is our San Francisco office, because we have real case studies. We have real effect and real ROI that we can show.
So we are showing them the case studies that are happening there.
Why not? Why shouldn’t they happen here? The failure is the same.
Even in Silicon Valley, 10 metres from our office, of every 10 companies, 80 will fail. This is innovation.
So it’s the same here. But you should not be afraid of it, because when you create a new product, 80 per cent of the time it’s not going to work—we’re showing them that it’s okay to fail, but also there’s a lot of success.
What’s next for you?
Next for us is to stay digging deeper into being an aligned company, a company that will help people, help the planet and humanity and our dream is to become the biggest or the only reference agency in this book.