FutureBrand Australia gains B Corp certification, looks to reimagine agency impact
After a rigorous 18-month process, FutureBrand Australia has become the latest branding agency to achieve a B Corp certification. On the framework’s potential, Rich Curtis, the business’s CEO, said he’s most excited about it bringing in the right kind of clients.
The organisation behind the B Corporation Certification is a not-for-profit named B Lab. A search on its website with the keyword “advertising” revealed 49 businesses in Australia, of which FutureBrand is now a part.
Curtis
“The thing that excites me most about B Corp certification is that a lot of it is not an add-on,” Curtis told Mumbrella. “It’s not this little thing we do on a Friday afternoon once a month to make ourselves feel good about ourselves.”
Curtis said that FutureBrand shared B Lab’s belief that business is a force for good and that the agency was committed to making its business better in ways that reimagine the kind of impact it can create for its team, clients and the community. “It’s this that has been the motivation to build the business into what I knew it could be, and it has given us the momentum to continue to grow and evolve,” he added.
B Lab creates standards, policies, and tools to improve the culture and impact of business, and offers its rigorous Business Impact Assessment as a strategic framework for measuring a company’s social and environmental impact. Companies that demonstrate a positive social and environmental impact can achieve B Corp Certification through a robust process that ensures transparency and accountability at every step.
However, he explained that for a certificate like B Corp to actually become a point of advantage in, for example, the pitching process, it will depend a lot on the client’s perspective and business beliefs.
“I think it has to come from that client perspective in terms of what their business stands for and where they are at in terms of their supplier chain, and what their belief is about the kind of role in which they want to operate.
“That provides a very specific and much more productive platform for the kind of partners that you [as an agency] might want to have.
“I think it’s really taking what might ordinarily be described as a chemistry check, which is equally kind of fluffy at the best of times, and just putting much more rigour around that.”
The B Corp evaluation covered five areas, Curtis explained, including corporate governance, employee experience, client engagement, community involvement, and environmental footprint.
“It’s as much as anything about the holistic framework of how you operate the business,” he said.
Curtis said instead of developing FutureBrand’s own ESG framework and “codify things that we were already doing, but doing them perhaps in an ad hoc or even slightly haphazard manner”, B Corp is a “perfectly effective” framework to develop the business as a whole.
“When I bought the business three years ago now, one piece of advice I was given was to make it better than it was before. And those seven words have stuck with me both in a kind of formal and informal capacity,” Curtis continued.
“We’ve always been very transparent as a business – as transparent as we possibly can be in the ways in which we operate … It’s just one of our strengths or one of our beliefs.”
FutureBrand Australia’s B Corp Certification is effective immediately. In order to maintain certification, the agency will undertake the assessment and verification process every three years, demonstrating they are still meeting rising standards for social and environmental performance.
Catch the full interview with Rich Curtis on Mumbrellacast after 4pm tomorrow.
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Darcy Song was a reporter at Mumbrella, covering media owners, adtech and social platforms. She left in October 2023.
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