Pat Murphy
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising for the future and will dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Jos van Oostrum, one of those secret heroes inside an organisation that’s making such a difference. Jos is the Senior Director for Mars Sustainable Solutions. He leads a team whose mission inside the global Mars brand is to find scalable solutions which help restore ecosystems and improve the resilience and livelihoods of the communities.

Did I get that right, Jos?

Jos van Oostrum
Absolutely no, you did, and it’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it? First of all my name and then, second of all, the whole title and what I do! But, yes, spot on.

Pat Murphy
Well, look, thank you so much for doing this podcast, and it is a first for me. I have to say. I’ve never interviewed a zoologist before. What exactly does that mean?

Jos van Oostrum
It’s a great question. Zoology is animal sciences really. I wanted to be a vet when I was little but realised I didn’t have the grades. It was a big lottery to try and get in and then my alternative really was zoology because I thought that’s still a way of connecting with nature, connecting with people and, most importantly of course, connecting with animals. It’s animal sciences – quite broad. It covers biology and the heart sciences. But what is nice, during my degree I also was able to cover sociology, I think, and anthropology and mixing them up a bit, because I found out very quickly I’m not a heart scientist, I’m a little bit of both. So that was nice, that it offered me an opportunity and a platform to dabble in both sociology and in the hardcore sort of biology and animal science.

Pat Murphy
And at what point when you were growing up did you actually know you wanted to do that?

Jos van Oostrum
A very young age. I remember when we only had three channels on television and you had to walk to the television to change the channel and we lived with my granddad. So he was basically. He lived on one floor and when we were on the floor above, so it was quite sort of cosy, shall we say, and it was lovely actually to know him.

So it’s the first seven years of my life I knew him and on Sundays we would sit down together as a family and then watch nature documentaries and I just remember all being together and watching something amazing because other worlds were brought into your living room and I got this whole zest for wanting to explore, wanting to go out there. But I was fascinated by the animal world, particularly anything living in the ocean, to be honest. So I used to draw killer whales on the street and so I have the most amazing and powerful, you know almost visceral memories of that and I’ve always stayed connected. You know I’ve become a pet shop boy. I worked in a pet shop for five years because my parents didn’t want me to have any pets, so I found pets myself and all of that. So it was pretty clear I was going to do something with nature, people and animals from about the age of six or seven.

Pat Murphy
Like you, when I was watching the TV, we only had three channels as well. When we were growing up, and I used to watch Jacques Cousteau on my mum and dad’s black and white TV It was still incredible even though it was only in black and white, but we are obviously seeing incredible imagery n ow, with the likes of David Attenborough, it’s an amazing how that’s all brought it to life.

Jos van Oostrum
Absolutely, and it still is important. Yes!

Pat Murphy
And finding a zoologist working in a big organization or a brand is unusual. I think you’re the first person or the first zoologist I’ve ever met in a brand organization. How did that happen?

Jos van Oostrum
Well, the first thing I’d say actually is, if you ask people about what they’ve studied, you’ll find out there’s more zoologists but they might not want to talk about it, I don’t know, but there’s quite a few of us out there and it’s great, you know. For me, I hope it doesn’t become something unique going forward, because anybody who studies natural sciences absolutely has a place in big business. You know, it’s not one of those. I need to make a choice between academia or doing something that fixes all the bad that big companies have done. Don’t stand outside and shout at companies. Go within. You know, try and change things and behaviours from within, because the people who work in those companies are like you and me, right that we all have a purpose, we all have a passion. They might be diverse, they might have seemed the same documentary you know Jacques Cousteau, like you and me.

So I think it’s important to tap into human beings and you can do that by being in a business. They make money to sort of be free, right to grow and to do their things. And now I’m in a family owned business, which is even more exciting, of course, because there is a real space for doing something that is very long term and very out there. So I feel it’s no longer a niche, but I’m part of conversations that make the business tick every day and choices that are being made. I’m being asked to not just give feedback. In some cases I make the choices and how powerful is that?

Pat Murphy
That’s amazing, but Mars wasn’t the first big company you worked for, was it? What was the very first one? What was your motivation originally?

Jos van Oostrum
When I graduated in 1995… my degree was six years because I added a bit of sociology to it. But I still remember it was quite gloomy actually the outlook because there was a lot of unemployment in the Netherlands. People had invested. My debt was 30,000. Guilders in those days that’s like 20,000 euros.

So I came out and I thought I need to earn some money and there was nothing there. So I approached my old supervisors and I said ‘what is happening around the world? Could you help me out? Are there people who need people like me’? And I ended up just sort of. First of all, before I had my sort of big job at a big company, I just traveled around the world. I was in Pakistan working on irrigation management. As a zoologist I had nothing to do with irrigation management, but I just looked at how people were dealing with irrigation management and being upstream and downstream and how that affected the whole political and socio-political structure around an agricultural system. So that was fascinating.

And then I was in Kenya for two or three years. Basically anybody who would pay me a stipend and would get me a ticket out there. I said ‘yes’, and that was the way to sort of get in there and because of my work in Kenya, I was called when I was back in Wageningen in the Netherlands after my time in Kenya and they said, ‘hey, we’ve heard of your work in Kenya and would you like to come to Cambridge and work for Unilever’? And I said, ‘what, explain’, right? This is 1998, right, April 98. And I remember it while it was snowing, as I flew into Cambridge and they said, ‘well, we are going a bit on a journey to try and figure out sustainability for a big business like ours and in our agricultural supply chains, and the most iconic one we have in the United Kingdom’. So I have to clarify this was United Kingdom, ‘are those famous peas that are picked and frozen within two and a half hours’, right, the birds eye pea? So I basically my first job was going on a quest for the sustainable pea on behalf of Birds Eye, working with farmers in Humberside and East Anglia and these are you know, you don’t want to mess around with those farmers, they are farmers through and through, but I talked to them about ‘hey, we as a business want to understand what it means to call something sustainable’. And we went on a whole journey of looking at skylarks in relation to growing peas, because you give them landing strips, right? So, oh, great, peas are great for skylarks. What about? ‘Oh, yes, they fix nitrogen’. Oh, how do we measure soil health? Oh, let’s measure worms, right? So I?

And then I hired a professor, a professor of worms, shall we call him?! But he flew around and this is this is quite funny OK, he flew around in a helicopter. So this was Mr Sustainable, right. And he flew around in a helicopter from East Anglia to Humberside, because he said my sampling regime goes much quicker and I can do my job in two days rather than two weeks. So he was like the A-Team.

Really funny!

Pat Murphy
But it was amazing actually that you know that conversation was being had in 1998, which is quite a long time ago. Obviously, sustainability is definitely on the agenda right up there at the top of the agenda right now, but in 1998, to be having that, you know, credit and kudos to Unilever really.

Jos van Oostrum
Yeah, and it was quite nice that we were left. We were given quite a bit of freedom just to discover  what it truly means, rather than having this ‘well, there’s 10 indicators and we need to do this and we need to measure it like that’. We were quite free and I remember working with Jonathon Porritt on this journey – he founded the Green Party and that Forum for the Future. A man who I didn’t know when I came to the UK but then very quickly understood, was a man of quite some standing and provided advice to a lot of people behind the scenes and learned a lot from Jonathan Porrit, and then also Jules Pretty was quite a famous and still is a famous academic and he was super eloquent and he had actually taught me while I was in Wageningen. He taught me some courses, right? And here I am coming to the UK and I have the privilege of working with two of these heavyweights, so it was really nice.

But my most lasting memories are really with the farmers that I worked with in the United Kingdom, you know, to get them on a journey where all of a sudden, they become ambassadors and they found their voice, rather than being bashed around the ear because of what they do is can’t be right and it’s always evil. They are mini businesses themselves. So I thought, ‘well, if I can do this with a single farmer, then you can translate that right the way up to the business and the CEO of a business’. But when you say 1998 early, I think we were lucky in Unilever with the sort of CEOs that we had coming in over time.

Pat Murphy
Was that Paul Polman at the time when you were there?

Jos van Oostrum
In 1998 there were other people, so there were two people in front of Polman, but I have to say Polman – we sort of co created the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. So I worked very closely with him, with Mark Engel who was the Chief Procurement Officer at the time, and with Karen Hamilton, who is still at Unilever today. It was quite amazing to see that sort of be created whilst at the same time not alienating the functions in the business and to make them own it. So to have this whole idea of ‘it needs to come from within, and the biggest power, of course, lies with all the amazing brands that that the company has’. So if can say something about Lipton Tea. Tea can do that which then talks about social housing and education, and I still remember hearing the music and seeing that and nearly being, you know, in tears, thinking ‘but this is not greenwashing, this is real, because I’ve seen it with my own eyes and we’re talking to people about it’. So that purpose journey, I think in those early days I realized that that was also very much what makes me tick, and still makes me tick today. You know get super excited about it.

Pat Murphy
And I think a lot of that ways of working at Unilever resulted in, I think, Paul’s book called Net Positive, which I always think is a good blueprint for everybody to use as a starting point.

Jos van Oostrum
Yeah, and his book and I follow him still. You know he’s on LinkedIn a lot, of course as well. He does a lot of publications, a lot of quite provocative statements, right, that he makes, but he just wants people to truly think things through. What I like about Paul is that he doesn’t just criticize but he gives people a framework within which they can operate. And also not afraid to say ‘I’ve got it wrong’, right? ‘I failed, I’ve made the wrong choices too’. That degree of honesty I think is really refreshing.

And companies who talk about their mistakes. One that I can mention – I’ve seen Oakley do a website about how Oakley messed up. They wrote their own website and they said ‘we’ll put all our mistakes on here and you can have a giggle but also see how we’re moving on’, and I think that is quite refreshing really, because it’s not all plain sailing, it’s not all smooth and silky.

There’s still people out there who have the old economic growth model that Keans had about unlimited, and it can all be fine and there is no such thing as a doughnut that we drop off.

Paul: instrumental, but there’s people like him, you know, there’s more and more people and I still think actually within young entrepreneurs especially who start-up businesses. I find it so brave that you’re not just starting up a business, but you’re doing it with such a strong purpose and such a belief that you want to do things the right way. And yeah, I think it is so different from 20, 30, 40 years ago, where you started up a business to make money and now it’s ‘well, hang on. I do this within quite a tricky space’, right, and I just love it. I love it.

Pat Murphy
Absolutely. And I think a lot of people who are looking for new jobs, particularly young people, are looking for more than just what they’re going to get paid, and I think they’re looking for working for companies that have the same set of values as they have, and I think that’s an important thing these days.

Jos van Oostrum
Yes, yes!

Pat Murphy
So you went from Unilever to Diageo and now you’re running, I suppose, like a little black ops unit for sustainability in Mars. Tell us a bit about that!

Jos van Oostrum
Yes. So I joined Mars about – just shy of nine years ago and my first three years in the company were very much about Mars moving from making their operations sustainable so looking at all the factory sites and things like that and renewable energy. And people will know that we’ve invested quite a lot of money in wind energy farms to make at least our operations carbon neutral, which was a very brave thing to do, a very good thing to do. Get in there early and I think others are following suit. So that was the first part of their journey.

But then diving into the supply chain reel, where the biggest impacts lie, was fascinating. I was hired to help go on that journey and to not have the procurement function run away in fear and screaming ‘well, hang on, what do you want us to do? You want us to map the whole supply chain. You want us to figure out everything’. But now of course, this is all everyone’s bread and butter. But just being part of that journey and also say, ‘don’t worry’, we’re not going to ask you to do everything and come up with this sort of lame term like ‘continuous improvement’, because that means nothing to anyone, but come up with a framework that are five impact areas. So you’re talking about land use and water use and greenhouse gas emissions – the traditional ones. But also human rights and farmer income, and they are quite you know, they’re not so easy to lean into right? So those are the five lenses through which we examined every raw material supply chain, or certainly the big ones to start with, and then said have a priority-based approach, so to say, if it’s rice grown in Pakistan, then it’s water and income that are the most important ones. So dive into those and try and do great things there. So I quite like the framework and I helped very much guide, as a co-pilot, the procurement function in Mars on their journey with creative assets, with animations. You know about a dog and a cat talking about sustainable sourcing in Mars. You can find Rex and Fluffy on the internet still if you type in Mars Sustainable Sourcing, Rex and Fluffy – up they jump!

So I realised the importance then of a bit of marketing. And then, three years in, I was getting, dare I say, maybe a little bit bored just sitting at that site and I said I would like a big program of change and leading a big program of change within Mars. And then my then boss said ‘well, I know Frank Mars’, one of the Mars family members, so Mars is a surname, just so you know for everybody. Not everybody knows that! Said you know, ‘he’s on a journey, he’s all into ecosystem restoration and he’s looking for somebody to lead, shall we say, his dream’. So I met him four and a half years ago in London and it was incredible.

We had a three or four hour dinner in a hotel somewhere in London and he talked me through his vision and it took me like a millisecond to say yes! I didn’t even know after the meal whether I had the job on Mars. It was one of those surreal circumstances but I think we hit it off okay. And when he was talking to me about the importance of pollinators in the supply chain and the importance of diversifying farming systems and the importance also of healthy coral reefs, I just went ‘oh, you’re talking about bees, seas and trees’. So I just came up with those words when he was talking that’s great, love that, and we use that as our yeah, as a little mantra every said. But that’s how it started Ecosystem and restoration and basically being a family member driving change within the business is actually. It sounds easy but it is not, because the Mars family do not run the business anymore. They sit on board, they rotate, they can operate within the business as they, you know, by applying themselves. But you know, you all start at the bottom of the ladder and you work your way through. So Frank, entrusted me with the journey.  I have to say we’ve sort of peaked a bit more on the marine ecosystem side, just because, dare I say, it’s a whiter space. There’s not many companies operating in it. So therefore, linking that back to a narrative that people go ‘ah, I get it and I didn’t know you were doing that’ is a little easier in all things ocean and ocean health and livelihoods, compared to terrestrial, where a lot of people are falling over themselves, all with the same stories and the same claims. So I’m brutally honest here, right about also, you need to go where not many people are and then do something amazing and then let everybody feel a little bit jealous and left out.

Pat Murphy
And with the Frank story. Obviously it does mean, though, that sustainability is in the DNA of the business, and I think that’s really a great start. Always starts from the top, I think and you mentioned talking about sustainability underwater. It’s such a critical area to get right, because you know the stats around what’s happening underwater is frightening, right?

I read off one of your videos, I think it was if we don’t start fixing it now, then 90% of all coral reefs will be destroyed by 2040.  I saw that you have been doing a campaign called Sheba Hope Grows Campaign. Right, tell us a bit about that. Tell us a bit about that, because it looks really inspiring for me.

Jos van Oostrum
Yeah so I mean back to your first point around just the realisation how we’re all connected to the ocean, right, where it looks like a scary big place, and you go, oh but, and there’s so many things going wrong and species are getting extinct. Coral reefs, as you just rightly said –  yes, if we don’t do anything, our children might not see coral reefs in their lifetimes, right, and that starts. I mean, even as I say this to you, I can feel the hair just rise on my arm and I just get a bit of a chill. And that’s not just going to visit the coral reef and see it and being in awe of its beauty, but just you know, reef themselves. Of course, they cover 0.1% of the ocean floor but are somehow responsible for 25% of all marine life! Now, just think about that for a moment. You just go, ‘wow’. So if you’re having to make a choice as a company to invest in, whether it’s land health or ocean health, then coral reefs sort of came to the surface quite quickly as a sensible place to start.

Now we also know that coral reefs are the sort of canary in the climate-change coal mine, if I can use that metaphor. I hope it translates to everybody listening. But it’s like that is one of the first ecosystems to go, with climate change being what it is, and we’re now talking about hottest  year and July on record and things like that. So I think I don’t have to explain to anyone that this is a reality. But it’s not just climate change, it’s also human destruction, it is agricultural runoff, it’s fishery, so there’s so many other factors that are really messing up reefs everywhere. So the reason to choose that was quite an obvious one, just because of our dependency on it. Now, looking, then, what I didn’t want to do is just be seen as leading this lovely corporate social responsibility initiative and, ‘yeah, that’s fine, and that’s one of the family members’ hobbies and isn’t that great’.

And no, no, no, no, this is a business imperative! Don’t tell me that I’m sort of on the fringe doing something nice and a hobby. So three years or so ago and I still remember this so well, Pat. I called up the Chief Marketing Officer in Petcare in the business, Jane Wakley. She’s no longer in Mars now, but I saw her in spirit because I think I just sent her a message at some stupid time like quarter to midnight saying ‘hey, I’m leading this coral restoration program in Indonesia..

Pat Murphy
You had a couple of beers in you?

Jos van Oostrum
Well yeah… brave! It was one of those where flexible working, taking to the extreme.

But I literally – it was one of those moments where I had, I was really excited because I had having seen what I did in Unilever and then also before I joined Mars, I also spent three years at Diageo. The power of brands, right, for those two companies, I don’t have to explain, right, you’ve got a Guinness there and then you’ve got Unilever and all its brands –  the Ben and Jerry’s and the Doves and things like that. So I knew about the power, but I knew that Mars was quite a modest company in the sense of shouting loud and proud through its brands, right. Yeah, the brands are great and they are. The quality you like and you connect with those brands because you like the products, but just for that, not for maybe the purpose that they represent or the extra that they might be doing. And I thought, ‘wow, what an opportunity we have’. And if you then think about pet care – Sheba is one of the fastest growing Cat food brands we have, alongside Whiskers as well, but we are using fish products, byproduct from the fishing industry that go into our products that we sell to consumers. So we take from the ocean. What is the best way to give back? And I just explained that right. So well, choose coral reefs, because they represent 25% of all marine life.

So when I sold this story to Jane in my little email, she responded literally within five seconds saying ‘I’ll see you next week in the Paddington office with my Sheba team because I think we’re going to do something amazing’. And the reason she said that – she contextualized it: I have this weekend come home with my family, having spent time on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and I’ve witnessed with my family what is happening underwater. The destruction of something so beautiful and so important.

Now, again, as I talk about it, I go ‘wow, that was one of those moments that really changed my life and my career’. And I think we can all find those moments by not being afraid, by stepping out.  You know what is the worst that can happen? That she laughs in your face? Or she says ‘have you been drinking’, as you just said? Right, ‘have you had two beers’?

And that’s the worst that can happen! If you show passion which is authentic and it’s not just coming out of thin air and it’s just a next big crazy thing, passion that is underpinned with something that you so believe in and seeing is believing, by the way. And I had that I full of and that then the whole journey with Sheba and Sheba Hope Grows the name Hope has been born through working with the creative agencies that are helping Sheba to think about what is the best hook that you could create with consumers. That becomes a living beacon of hope. The whole idea about just writing something underwater which, quite frankly, when it first came to me and you know I have a professor of marine biology, Professor David Smith, very well respected man in my team. When we first got the, got the request saying can we, can you spell the letters H-O-P-E, we just, you know, I could feel the gums in my mouth just hurting, thinking is this authentic? Is this right? Boy! I’m so pleased I listened and I’m so pleased that I said yes, because we now have this growing beacon that you can see from space. You can go on Google Maps, Google Earth, whatever you want to do, street view even and you type in hope-reef and you find it, you see it and people go it’s real, tell me more, what more are you doing and how can I help?

Pat Murphy
Pat, that’s amazing. And you talk about Jane Wakeley. I know exactly what kind of force of nature she is. I used to sit along the corridor from her when I was working at Procter & Gamble here in the UK.

Jos van Oostrum
Oh, fantastic! Yeah she’s amazing.

Pat Murphy
So you’re working with your creative agencies. Do you think sustainability is high enough on the agendas of the creative partners?

Jos van Oostrum
Yes! I do. I could be really facetious and say well, how do you organize your own business and what is your sustainability footprint as a business? Right. So I do think they are operating in old paradigms sometimes, so, with the way that they maybe send out teams everywhere around the world, right, and then all of a sudden, 20 people turn up at the Cannes Festival and 20 people turn up for a shoot somewhere and you go ‘that can be done differently’, and I’m exaggerating here, right, and I don’t want to, because I’ve done some amazing work with them as well, and so I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus here. But it’s more about, I think, they need to innovate and reinvent themselves as well in the way that they operate, so that they – their behaviour reflects sustainability rather than the campaigns that they run. That is super important, and the other bit that I sometimes you know if there was maybe a bit of a point of tension is that the desire to reinvent themselves all the time to go for the next big campaign.

So, beyond hope, what is hope 2.0? Well, hope 2.0 is not just us as Mars doing it, but helping people around the world, like a franchise model – be successful. And hope is the Reef stars that we are calling the actual method, or the devices that we’re using underwater, the frames. Reef stars to me are also people who are doing this work right around the world. So for me, the journey is all about getting those people out there, but sometimes I feel like that’s perhaps not good enough or they want to do something totally different and talk about maybe the ocean having human rights or the equivalent of human rights, which I understand. But it goes so far into a direction where you go just ‘hang on, let’s not throw the baby away with the bathwater’.

So there is healthy tension, shall I say, and I always have this whole idea about well, who’s leading, who right? Is it Sheba in control of the brand agency or the other way around. And I think it is very healthy tension, because you need to have some of that to be super creative. But I do think, if you get it right and if you allow teams like myself and individuals, I guess, like myself in on the conversation – boy, sparks can fly! And really amazing things happen.

Pat Murphy
Absolutely. I think we’re all also incredibly well positioned in our industry to be able to tell the right stories about what’s going on underwater. I think quite often it’s like you know, not seen or heard. It’s amazing how creatives filmmakers, producers, writers can tell amazing stories about going to space, going to Mars or whatever. But actually there’s a universe here that people are not telling stories enough about. So hopefully what you’re doing will turn that around a little bit. We’re certainly in a place where we can do it.

Jos van Oostrum
Yeah! We know not everybody has the amazing opportunity to discover the ocean and some people are afraid of it. Some people can’t swim, or there are bad stories that I hear and therefore they are afraid full stop. So getting people in a place where they can still connect with it but not be fearful of it and become hopeful, I think is so important. It’s a bit like also, we have parents, and both parents, for instance, can’t swim or are scared of the ocean, and the likelihood of children not going to learn how to swim and also be scared of the ocean is quite high. So it’s so important that we normalize it a little bit.

First of all, normalize and say ‘no, the ocean is not a scary place’ and that we provide opportunities and we can do as a business… It’s humble beginnings, Pat, but we are the concept of creating true ambassadors of hope. You know like you get at the UN and, of course, as well, but people to come in experience it. My first moment of jumping off a boat and seeing with my own eyes what my team was doing, learning how to dive on the job, Pat. I mean, I know it’s a privilege for me, right, but I learned how to dive on the job and when I saw the work that we did first-hand as a diver, close up… I still remember being so calm and so amazed by it that this was my discovery dive, which everybody does when they learn how to dive. They do a discovery dive. You go down, you come back up and then the instructor says, ‘right, can I see your air’? Or they do that underwater normally as well. And I had the same amount of air left as my instructor. And he said now, ‘that’s never happened to me before’. And I just said, ‘well, because you’ve taken me to my beacon, my work here, so I’m just so calm and so you know, you’ve taken me to the place that makes me feel alive’. So that was an amazing experience, I think, and I want to, even if I can create just a smidgen of that for people who are a bit tentative or don’t quite get it.

So we are creating opportunities through Sheba as the consumer brand itself, by having sort of coloured competitions where people can sign up to become a Sheba Hope ambassador, and boy, we’ve had so many people around the world – people who are National Geographic explorers, who happen to have a cat and buy Sheba, who have applied for the job, right, and you go ‘what’?

There’s another lady who has lived in the Congo for many years and discovered new groups of apes, and things like that, and I went ‘they are applying to become a Sheba Hope Grows ambassador?!’  So, so humbling, Pat, because a lot of people were thinking, well, now you get the usual people who have a big Instagram profile and they’re going just want to do a little bit more and this is all freebies… and no! The talent we’re getting. And then, even within Mars, we have also an ambassador program that allows people in Mars who are connected with the ocean to do an amazing job, but also those who are not.

So I think, yeah, we’re growing a bit of a movement here, Pat, that I want to become unstoppable, and I really would like for everyone to know that, wherever they might be in the world, even if it’s the most landlocked place in the world, that you can get to the ocean or experience it, even, as we said at the start, from sitting there with your granddad watching the television.  And go, “Granddad, I think things are okay out there. People are doing good things again”. You know and that’s that’s my what you heard David Attenborough talk a little bit about, right, in his final sort of episode and when he talked about restoration, I think that the program itself didn’t even air because there were controversial statements in it, because all of a sudden David Attenborough was talking about things that he was supporting. But I think the heroes there… the hero is not me. I enable others to be maybe a hero. That’s that’s how I see it and that’s why I love my job. Despite all the politics and despite all the issues that jobs have all around the world, I am a lucky man!

Pat Murphy
It’s brilliant, it’s brilliant, and I hope this podcast will help the movement.

Jos, honestly, I’m so inspired by what you’re doing. But, you know what? We’re running out of time. But I do have one final question for you, and it’s the one that we do on every single one of our prodcasts, and we have to ask our guests what is your favourite ad of all time?

Jos van Oostrum
It’s a great question, Pat and it’s not difficult for me. Yes, I know I mentioned, I worked at Diageo and, yes, Guinness gets mentioned a lot, but this is a particular Guinness advert. When I saw it I really… I was so touched and moved in so many different ways, and every time I watch it back I have the same feeling. Right, I get the exact same emotions. And it’s called the Guinness friendship ad, where it’s only a minute long, but you see people in wheelchairs, a group of men on a basketball court playing basketball, and you’re going. ‘I don’t know where this is going’, but they’re all getting a bit feisty and testosterone flying around.

I play five-a-side with middle-aged men on a Monday night, so I know exactly what that feels like. So here they are, playing, playing, playing. And then it comes towards the end of the game and all of a sudden you see all but one individual step out from their wheelchairs, step up and walk out and just, yeah, great game and this one job. You know, I can even get emotional when I talk about it, but this one chap who sits in the wheelchair still. And then you see the next shot in the bar having a Guinness and just talking about – it’s all about the choices you make right and how you help each other.

And they sit there enjoy their pint of Guinness. So it’s not the traditional Guinness ad, for it, like you have to wait, and you know, for the good thing to happen. But this was just celebrating humankind, focusing on human and mankind, and , you know, for friends, for mates to do that, for their mate, I mean it doesn’t get better than that right, that that sums up life right there. 

Pat Murphy
That’s a brilliant, that’s incredibly powerful, very, very powerful ad, and we’ll put it onto the prodcast page as well for everybody to take a look at.

Jos van Oostrum
Oh, that is kind of you.

Pat Murphy
Jos – fantastic. Thank you so much for being here. I know we deviated a little bit from advertising production today, but I do think it was worth it to hear all about the Sheba Hope Grows campaign. I could talk to you for hours but thank you very much for being here today.

Jos van Oostrum
Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks Pat.

Pat Murphy
Today we talked to Jos van Oostrum, the Senior Director for Mars Sustainable Solutions. It was an inspiring conversation, and I also want to suggest to our listeners to go to the Sheba Hope Grows website at www.shebahopegrows.com to check out the amazing initiative and campaign which Jos and his team are working on right now.

To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes.

If you’d like to feature on the Prodcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com.

I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, all of which the links and the notes for this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks again to Jos, my team at MCA and my production team at What Goes On Media.

Thanks for listening. See you next time!