One question. Answered three times over

Every organisation that depends on public consent faces the same problem: the community has to understand what you're doing, believe you, and let you proceed. When that breaks down, nothing else works – not the project, not the licence, not the reputation.

That has been my work for twenty-five years.

After an early career as an art director in Melbourne and Sydney – Scali McCabe Sloves, Mojo, Ogilvy & Mather, Clemenger – I moved to Hobart in 1996, and in 1999 founded my own agency.

Coo'ee Tasmania (1999)

In 2000, competing against established state and national agencies, we pitched and won Tasmania's road safety account with a single idea: just like that. In its first term it delivered the state's first fatality-free Christmas and New Year period since records began. Through to 2006, serious injuries fell by 25%. Independent research recorded it as "the highest recognition level we have recorded for an advertising campaign amongst any target group" (Tony Hocking, EMRS). Other states and territories adopted it. It was recorded in Hansard.

Invited to address children's health outcomes in regional South Australia, we lifted compliance from 48.3% to 72.5% in eighteen months – described by Dr Kevin Buckett, Director of Public Health, SA Health, as the best results he had seen for a community engagement campaign.

By 2007, thirty-four national and international awards.

Green Team Australia (2007)

We approached Green Team in New York – founded 1993, one of the first agencies dedicated to sustainability, with clients including Coca-Cola, Walmart and Johnson & Johnson. They took the call. Green Team Australia became their first office outside the United States, and the first Australian communications company wholly dedicated to sustainability.

We were appointed to manage Nyrstar's global communications across four continents, running shifts across Australian, European and North American time zones. We became the first Australian agency ever appointed by BASF, the world's largest chemistry company. We won the OZ Minerals brand against FutureBrand – delivered across five countries in four languages to 3,900 employees within four months. We created the brand for Kimberly-Clark's sustainability strategy. Southern Water's introduction of Tasmania's first residential water meters passed with barely a ripple.

By the close of Green Team Australia, forty-six awards.

SmithAssociates (2013)

A leaner consultancy, structured explicitly around the community engagement and social licence work that ran through the agency's campaigns from the very first. The name was new; the practice was not.

The Nyrstar work in Port Pirie continued through the Targeted Lead Abatement Program. It culminated in Come See Change – a reputational brand for an entire city that became its tourism brand.

Brand and engagement work for Smarter Regions AI followed, along with the creation of UniHub in the Upper Spencer Gulf.

Australia's largest aquaculture company approached us with a single explicit brief – turn its social licence around.

Forty-eight awards to date.

What it adds up to

Across all of it – road crashes, children's health, water pricing, lead abatement, a city's reputation – the problem was the same: a community that had stopped listening, or had never started. The method that solved it was the same too. When story, identity and campaign are genuinely aligned, results follow. Consistently.

Today I work directly with the organisations asking that question, and teach the thinking behind it through Creative Brand Coach.