The Head Of Havas on How Businesses Can Evolve to Do More Good

The Head Of Havas on How Businesses Can Evolve to Do More Good
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David Jones is a man who knows how to get a good message out. As the Global CEO of Havas and Havas Worldwide, Jones has made a career out of using creativity to change people's behavior and address some of the bigger issues facing the world. The author of the bestselling book Who Cares Wins: Why Good Business is Better Business (you can read an excerpt here), he has also become one of the most vocal advocates of corporate social responsibility. For his efforts, he was honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and as the Guardian Sustainable Business Leader of the Year 2013.

"When I got into the advertising business, I realized that actually what we do is we use the power of creativity to change people's behavior," Jones said. "And yes, of course, you can do that to change people's behavior around the commercial side of things and get them to buy product A, not product B. But we have an amazing power to use that creativity and almost I'd argue, an obligation to use creativity to change people's behavior around some of the big issues facing the world."

In 2005 Jones gave a speech at Advertising Age Idea Conference about reinventing creativity, which helped crystallize and publicize his views. His first foray into using his creativity to drive positive change was a cause campaign for the Australian Children's Cancer Institute to raise funds for a hospital. A turning point in Jones' social good career was his work on Kofi Annan's TckTckTck Campaign for Climate Justice, an open source platform on which 18 million people signed up as climate allies. As successful as the numbers were, according to Jones, it was also a massive failure because the world's politicians did nothing about climate change.

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