It’s just boring. It’s incredibly boring. 

I say this as someone who’s made many boring climate things. That was not the fault of the people doing the work. Everyone I’ve worked with in climate has been incredibly creative, inspiring, and passionate. But what does not exist is the structures and funding that allow them to do amazing work. We are hamstrung by impact reporting, which leads us to create boring, safe things.

Look at what we’re saying now: it’s urgent, we’re running out of time. And yet we have to go through 12 months of paperwork to get a campaign concept signed off for something that is relevant today. The money is there, and the money needs to be spent, and the money is not being spent. There are so many boxes to tick that by the time that you get it all done, the idea probably won’t work anymore.

‘The risk appetite is low’ is my favourite phrase. I use it all the time. We live in an economy where people who are doing these jobs are not the most privileged people. They’re people who are passionate about what they do, and they hope to be able to make a change, but they are hamstrung by their KPIs and the structures that they exist within. So their desire to do effective work is completely countered by having to show evidence up front that it will work. It doesn’t work like that.

The point of the Headline Newds work [which uses OnlyFans creators to campaign on climate change] is to obliterate the perception of the types of people who care about climate.

A majority of people support stronger, more meaningful climate action. But we have a very loud minority of people—typically men—who say that they don’t believe in climate change.

I wanted to show that you can be hot and care about the climate. You don’t have to be an activist. You don’t have to be granola. You don’t have to be Just Stop Oil. And having sexy women talking about it immediately makes it more aspirational to think and care about the climate crisis. It gives you an ability to come forward and say ‘Yeah, I care about this, I’m thinking about this.’

Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships, where a fan knows everything about a famous person, but that person knows nothing about the fan. We used to apply it when talking about celebrities, but now it’s used far more frequently to talk about the relationship between people and social media creators.

Creators create a level of intimacy with their audiences that we never had when relationships were mediated by the press. You’ll get people who listen to the same podcaster three times a week just talking about their lives and the things they’re passionate about. The audience’s worldviews and opinions develop based on what those creators say. The level of trust and engagement is exceptionally high.

I’ve always understood the messenger to be as important as the message. My first job was working for the Hacked Off campaign, which pushed for press regulation in the UK alongside the Leveson Inquiry, and a big part of my strategy was to get Hugh Grant on Twitter. 

People feel like they have a relationship with him and so if something comes from him, it’s so much more trusted than if it comes from an organisation. He did it, and that was a really big part of us growing the petition that led to us shaping the Royal Charter. 

I met Staci Roberts-Steele who is the managing director of Yellow Dot Studios, Adam McKay’s nonprofit [McKay wrote and directed Anchorman, Vice, The Big Short, and Don’t Look Up]. So I just went for it: 

“I’ve had this idea for a while. There is one parasocial relationship that I don’t think we’ve seen people try, and it’s with OnlyFans creators. We exist in a world right now where there is so little connection for this demographic of men, to show them there’s an alternative to the radicalisation pipeline that they are on. And we can reach them through these women that they have built relationships with.”

We didn’t just get OnlyFans creators to create content about the climate crisis. We worked with two of my close friends, Meg Prescott and Bree Essrig, who are OnlyFans creators, and we built the campaign with them.

We said: we know we want to reach this audience of men. We know that OnlyFans is a space where that can be done. How do we do it well? Because if I just came in as someone who had never been on OnlyFans as a creator, it would have been ineffective because I don’t understand the relationships and the dynamic.

We knew we had to do something that was sexy and funny and native to the platforms that it was on, and using the creators’ best capabilities—because too often creators are used as distribution platforms or as talent, and they are so much more than that.

The first series of Headline Newds was eight videos, and it reached millions and got huge amounts of press engagement, like NME, Channel 4, and the Guardian. It worked.

My other goal with this—to quote Stephen Yaxley-Lennon—is that I want to obliterate the Overton window when it comes to climate communications. 

We have been in this stuck state of trying to repeat things that used to work like test, learn and adapt. We need to make a space for people to try something big and crazy.

Thank you to the 145 of you who have referred colleagues to this newsletter. The views expressed in Policy Unstuck interviews are those of the interviewee, and do not necessarily represent Cast from Clay’s view. You can read our editorial guidelines for more information on the goals, process, and formatting of this series.