Antonella Broglia is a torrent of energy in action. With a career in advertising, where she became director or CEO of large companies, one day she abandoned everything to throw herself into activism: climate, communication, entrepreneurship or innovation. Italian born in Modena in 1959 and with a doctorate in Law, today she applies what she has learned to the causes she embraces. He ordered a cappuccino, but speaks with so much passion that he doesn’t even try.
Ask. What is an Italian like you doing in a place like this?
Answer. It was unexpected. I was sent for three months in 1988 when I worked in advertising and as soon as I landed I felt that something here belonged to me, a wonderful light, a sense of opportunity, an immediate comfort. And I stayed. Here I was able to do what I wanted, grow the ideas that interested me, transform them into projects and experience great loves.
Q. Why did you move from advertising to climate activism?
R. I am a communicator, which is also a form of activism, because exposing problems in words in front of people is. Advertising was incredible at that time, the place where everyone wanted to work: the best art directors, writers, thinkers, strategic planners, people who knew how to transform ideas, it was very artistic. But it collapsed.
Q. Did you burst a bubble?
R. Obviously. That industry didn’t know what to do when digital communication intervened and turned everything upside down. Furthermore, Belo Horizonte arrived, the climate marches, the world began to see things differently, planetary injustice was before our eyes and making shoes for a thousand euros was an aberration. The first big environmental marches changed me completely. Light No logo by Naomi Klein and thought I was on the wrong side, working to get people to buy more of the stuff whose production was impoverishing us all. And I left, one day I took my bike and left the Saatchi & Saatchi office in Plaza Santa Ana, I said goodbye to my colleagues who were watching me from the window and I left. Stop. I had just learned about Ted Talks, transformative speeches that talked about big progressive ideas. I got the Madrid license and we started staging different voices.
Q. Was Madrid still the city that fascinated you?
R. It was 2011, 2012 and this city was experiencing a time of change and enormous excitement. Do you remember? And I said to myself: let’s put on stage these people who are transforming local governments, talking about citizen consultations, the 15M, open technologies, media labs… People who didn’t know each other met to see how to improve their neighborhoods, their homes, the environment, and in that wave I began to understand that communication was a tool to accelerate these phenomena.
Q. How do you evaluate the advertising that is done today?
R. There are great individual creators in high-end media like Adidas or Nike and then there’s digital. Today I no longer have to think about whether an advertisement is good or bad. It is more important for a computer to test 70 ads to see which one is best than for a person’s genius.
Q. We have become data.
R. We are the data, the new oil, we are the natural resources, not only in advertising: the baby monitor, the fryer or the mobile phone take your data and measure your consumption to propose cross-selling. Is it good or bad? I can’t imagine a civilization that abandons cell phones and I don’t know if I want to, what I want is to decide what to do with the data. What would happen if we created a data management cooperative? Can you imagine that instead of selling it to fryers it could be used for something positive? I know it’s unthinkable, but it’s worth thinking about.
Q. You teach how to give speeches. In Spain do we know how to give them?
R. What we don’t know is to think of talks as something functional and they are, as they are seen in the Anglo-Saxon world. A speech is not good or bad, but rather a functional exercise to achieve what I have set out to do. If I know why I give it, I study the arguments that allow me to convince and I get a good chat.
Q. And here we understand it?
R. We don’t prepare here. We all know how to talk, no one in this mess has a problem talking to anyone, hundreds of years ago we would sit down at night to talk about the experience of hunting or fishing. The question is: what is the purpose? What do I want to achieve? If we prepared more, we would be as good as anyone.
Q. The best?
R. Al Gore, who brings hope but also problems. Ken Robinson, who taught us another way to teach and listen to a child’s mind by knowing how to use humor. In Spain Eva Saldaña, president of Greenpeace, who knows how to present a possible future. The good ones never improvise.
Q. The main tip?
R. Suppose you have to prepare it like a violin concert. With my students I work with post-it notes, never with Word, we move them like Lego bricks and so the conversation can change. You have to give the ideas a chance to move to see what flow is best. Then comes the recorder. The post-it and the tape recorder are the only tools.
Q. The climate is his great battlefield and the great topic of his speeches. Can individuals fight without states?
R. No. Obviously you need to know what you buy, what you eat, how you go to work and it’s better to have solar panels. It is part of this consciousness. But the enormous power of the individual is the public march, demanding changes in laws, corporations and manifesting as society. It’s not the individual’s fault.
Q. From a communication point of view: why do far-right ideas triumph?
R. For me there is a hunger for authenticity, for someone who speaks like you, and people don’t find it. Politicians say what you expect them to say with a constant loss of opportunity, when they should be putting their truth on the table: Why are you in politics? Do you want to create a better world? How do you convince me? Some have a more personal treatment, they speak with sensitivity, like Gabriel Rufián, but it is a fairly isolated case. As politicians they have to sell me a version of the truth so that I can buy it. Many had writers, from Luther King to Kennedy to Obama, but they would sit down for days to create together. I miss a more authentic connection between the person and the things he says, which however are always hidden behind clichés regardless of the truth.
Q. And is the far right more authentic?
R. He has greater audacity with more risky, radical, direct, stimulating speeches, without intellectualism, with great audacity. His ideas connect to people’s problems, to kids who feel displaced, to people who have lost their jobs, to those who don’t understand the ecological transition. And then there is belonging: an American artist infiltrated a group ultra convinced that birds in the cities were drones spying on us and understood that for those people it wasn’t what mattered, but sitting with other people and talking. It’s that simple.
