Creativity That’s Part of the Solution: Differ Agency’s Sustainable Success Story
Sustainability-focused Stockholm creative shop Differ Agency is only three years old, but seems to have found a groove that any startup would be proud of. It’s growing during a recession – something that many Swedish agencies are finding difficult – and has added four new clients in the last three months.
However, the creative agency wasn’t grown entirely from nothing. Differ actually began in the ‘90s as a brand development business with a strategic focus, but in 2021 a creative capability emerged, which became Differ Agency, while the legacy side of the business took on the name Differ Strategy. In August 2023 Differ Technology was founded as the company’s third branch.
With sustainability as a core principle for the agency, growth has been cautious but steady. Its creative talent offering began with Johan Angantyr, creative director and founding partner, but 2022 brought the addition of Johan Gustafsson, art director and partner, and to date, the agency has 11 full-time employees.
The projects Differ Agency has put out there sing more loudly than that headcount might suggest though. Seeing creativity as a tool for helping brands speed up the transition needed to combat the climate crisis, every project from the agency shows how change is possible.
“We are focusing on getting good and sustainable companies and services out to people, using communication as a really effective tool to make the sustainable transition go much faster,” explains Johan Angantyr. “We need that. We don't have enough time at the moment. All the alarm clocks are on so to speak, and people turn to brands and businesses to be a part of the solution for a sustainable development. We see creativity as a great tool for that.”
The agency often talks about ‘sustainable growth’ framing the environmental challenges we all face as an opportunity for companies to lead the way for the change that is needed. That often means showing clients visions of how they can be part of that change - not just working with the brands that are already on the right track.
“Sometimes you might have a conversation with a company that on paper might not seem super sustainable, but I'm really interested in getting conversations where they want to transition into sustainable business,” says Angantyr.
One such client is Vattenfall, the Swedish-founded multinational power company, which is by no means 100% renewable yet, but is making strides in the right direction, such as promoting its district heating solutions in cities.
“Past business for them was not super sustainable, but they have made it the core of their business to create sustainable energy for people and then we communicate it for them,” notes Angantyr. “Sometimes categories of business are lagging behind of course, and some are really in the forefront, but it's important to start the conversation with not-so-good categories too, to see what the business development and communication can do. But we're not working with pure evil companies,” he adds.
Greenwashing is an important consideration. For Johan Gustafsson, transparency with clients is crucial to ensure that Differ Agency doesn’t find itself complicit in this kind of activity. At this time of expansion and taking on new clients, “we need information on what level they are serious to really make the good, right, needed choices,” he says.
Many of the agency’s clients are early adopters of sustainable practices, and the four most recent new business wins demonstrate the range that is possible within that description. One of those was a repitch which Differ Agency won to retain Region Gotland – the government account for the Swedish island for whom the agency generated impressive column inches last year through a stunt called ‘The World’s Ugliest Lawn’.
The project created a global water-conserving ugly-lawn movement. It was launched in collaboration with the Hollywood star and environmentalist Shailene Woodley, and has, without any media budget, had an earned reach of 1.1 billion from the launch in October 2023 to January 2024.
Sustainable tourism is a growth area that fits perfectly with Differ Agency’s ethos, so it’s no great surprise that it won the Visit Skåne account recently. Watch this space for inventive communication to promote Sweden’s southernmost region to environmentally-conscious travellers.
Another client win for the agency is Matsmart-Motatos, a food-waste-reduction company in the Nordic region that’s trying to make saved food an ingredient in people’s everyday life. Founded on the insight that huge amounts of food and consumer products are tossed away – not because they’re not consumable, but for a whole range of other reasons, such as seasonal changes, faulty packaging or short best-before dates – Matsmart-Motatoes buys surplus from FMCG suppliers and sells it cheap online to cost and climate-conscious consumers in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, and Austria.
“Manufacturers have to throw away a lot of products even before they get to the stores. And they have a solution for that,” says Angantyr. “So we of course work with people who are really interested in finding great solutions for problems.”
Then there’s the Sveriges Geologiska Undersökning (SDU), the governmental body for mining and geological issues in Sweden, who is responsible for protecting and preserving water – “everything below ground,” says Angantyr of his new client.
Gustafsson notes that mining hasn’t been focused on nearly enough in the ecological discussion. “But now with the need to secure materials for the green transition, they’re increasingly getting the spotlight on them because they are the authority on efficient mines, where we should have them, and what materials we need to use.”
All of these sorts of projects help Differ Agency in a virtuous cycle – a sustainable way of doing business. “Of course we do those projects because we think they are the right solution for those clients,” says Gustafsson, “but also we see them as a way of getting the attention of the right kind of clients – companies that want to make the right choices and be a part of the sustainable transition.”
That ties in with a philosophy of the agency that comms should help the green transition to happen in itself, not just tell people about it. ‘The World’s Ugliest Lawn’ helped people to use less water, for example. “It's not only a message on a TV commercial, telling people to save water. It became a tool for saving water,” says Gustafsson.
A recent project, ‘Construction Emissions Exposed’ (in Swedish, ‘Byggutsläppslistan’), takes a similar approach in that it’s a tool, not a comms project. It is, as far as we know, the world’s first list of declared construction emissions on project level. The purpose is to increase transparency and speed up the necessary sustainable transition. The website is launched in Sweden but can be scaled globally when the data is available. The client is Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) Sweden – an advocacy group that wants to reduce the impact of construction on the climate.
As Angantyr points out, flights account for only around 2% of global emissions, while construction is more like 37%. “We need to also shine light the vast emissions from the construction and property sector” he says.
For the first time, the tool Differ Agency built shows what construction declared emissions are on project level. In Sweden, since January 1st 2022, it has been a requirement for new construction to submit a climate declaration that reports the impact on the climate the new building has. Not all parts of the construction emissions have to be reported and not all building types are included in the law, but Differ Agency sees this is an important first step for the industry.
The Construction Emissions List publishes figures on declared emissions from new construction in Sweden, sorted by project, municipality or developer. New projects will be added as they are completed, but there are already over 800 ranked on the site. “So starting from now, people in the construction and real estate sector in Sweden will know that big parts of their construction emissions will be publicly known,” says Gustafsson. “The days of putting your head in the sand like an ostrich are gone. That way, we see that type of project as not only telling people what to do, but a part of solving the problem.
“Obviously the emissions problem of the construction industry is huge. And we are not trying to solve it alone, far from it. But this is a new and important step, we believe.”
Angantyr asserts that “transparency is the first step to get to solutions.” And with the EU sustainable reporting directive requiring large and listed companies to publish regular reports on the social and environmental risks they face, and on how their activities impact people and the environment, there is regulatory demand for much more transparency to various sectors.
“This is coming,” says Gustafsson. “Hiding from it is not a good strategy. It's like having a white patch on your map that isn't explored yet. And being against it is kind of mediaeval.”
Instead, it’s much better to find ways that lead to the future, like how Differ Agency is collaborating with the City of Stockholm this week at the world's biggest real estate event, MIPIM in Cannes, to highlight the large amount of waste usually generated by such events, and to inspire change.
The ‘Waste Gallery’ is a booth made of construction waste from the fair. “So what other people throw away when they build a booth, we use to build our Stockholm booth,” explains Gustafsson. The agency is also working with a French-founded design firm Smarin, so that after the exhibition has ended, it will dismantle all the pieces, store them, and use them on coming commissions and projects. “We want to inspire other exhibitors to build their booths and more sustainable ways for next year,” he adds.
“A lot of people talk about sustainability, but it's just talk and not any action. That's not interesting for us. We want to do things for real. And when you do things for real, people react. That's the kind of energy that we use to get the message out in earned media about our initiatives.”
That’s the same energy that both Johans will be looking forward to seeing when the first sustainability prize of the premier creativity award in Sweden (‘Guldägget’/’The Golden Egg’) is awarded in April 2024. It’s called ‘Omställningsägget’ (‘The Green Transition Egg’) and began in shock that the Swedish agency association Komm, who runs the Guldägget, didn’t have a sustainable advertising category. So, Differ Agency asked why in an article on Swedish advertising publication Resumé .
To its credit, that started a conversation, and subsequently, Kommwanted to make it happen. But, the team only had two months before the awards, which presented a challenge.
Differ Agency collaborated with another agency called +1 to get the award ready in time before it opened for entry. “It was initiated by us, but it couldn't have been made without other agencies thinking in the same way,” says Gustafsson.
“The project will win this year, and the aim must be that next year, the winner is even better. That will happen every year because we need to make more effective, better and more brilliant ideas to accelerate this green transition. It's not restarting as a blank canvas every year like the other category categories do.”
But for now, above all else, Differ Agency just wants to grow slowly and consciously. “Every new person we add is very important for our future progress,” says Gustafsson. “We have really high standards for the people that we hire. You need to have a specific mindset to thrive in our agency because we have many people who are likely to do many different aspects of what it means to work in a creative agency. Each person is not only doing one kind of work.”
However, with the recent account wins, it’s likely that that team will once again have to grow. Thankfully, the attention Differ Agency’s projects are getting means they should have access to some of Stockholm’s best creative sustainability thinkers. And seeing the projects that have earned that attention, who wouldn’t want to help pave the next few steps on this path? It looks incredibly satisfying.
Gustafsson concludes: “We try to do communication that is part of the solution; not only the ordinary communication that tells people what to do.”
