Corporations are not obligated to contribute to nonprofit organizations. But what if serving the underserved would drive sales? What if addressing the most pressing social issues would improve profits? What if making the world a better place would increase share price? Paul Polizzotto has demonstrated that social impact does, indeed, drive business value, and he is on a mission to transform commerce and afford resources to our most urgent social issues.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast with Nori. I am Ross Kenyon, Paul Gamble and Christophe Jospe. We are in Manhattan together. We are running around town all day. We’re taking meetings. We’re meeting with friends, new friends, old friends. It’s been a nice mix. We haven’t been back here in a little bit.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah, lots of friends. We’re sitting here in the CBS office. Across the table from us is Paul Polizzotto. He is the founder and president of CBS Ecomedia and the founder and CEO of GiveWith.
Unknown speaker: Did he get it right?
Paul Polizzotto: He did get it right.
Christophe Jospe: It’s a special day for me. I don’t always get chills when I meet someone. I’m like, man, this person is going to change the world. But now we’re two for two because I had chills when I was speaking to Lorraine. She had chills. And the first time I heard Paul Polizzotto speak, I actually also got chills. I was like, I got to chase this guy down.
Unknown speaker: Are you susceptible to flattery?
Christophe Jospe: I was... I was participating in the Founder Institute and he came and gave a presentation and he was talking about how his platform basically leverages media and helps brands do the right thing and make money by doing that. And I guess we’re going to learn more about that. But Paul, we like to start out with people’s story, basically how they got to where they are and why they might...
Paul Polizzotto: Well, although we’re in Manhattan, Manhattan, New York, my story actually started in Manhattan Beach, California. So I grew up in a small beach town in Southern California and grew up As a surfer, a competitive surfer, but I stayed amateur. And I grew up surfing in the late 70s, early 80s, and Santa Monica Bay was really polluted. And here we were involved in this very healthy sport, but we were sick all the time. And, you know, I was always curious about what types of activities were leading to contributing pollution to Santa Monica Bay and making us sick.
And so, recognized that there were some activities happening in stormwater and runoff and some contractors that were cleaning parking lots and industrial sites and manufacturing facilities, even bioinfectious waste areas at hospitals and washing the pollutants into the storm drain and ultimately in the bay. And so I saw these activities and said, hey, that’s making us sick. And not only is it making us sick, it’s illegal. It’s a non-stormwater discharge and a violation of the Federal Clean Water Act. And if I could come up with a compliant way to do these activities, I could legalize and legitimize an industry and remove those pollutants from entering Santa Monica Bay.
So I’m a serial social entrepreneur. I’ve spent the last 30 years finding new ways to bring resources to improving the environment, health and education. In communities in the US, but now through GiveWith, it’s global. We have an office in London and Amsterdam and we’re working all over the world. But so my father is an engineer. My brother is an architect and an engineer. So I’m not a trained engineer, but I developed some methods for reducing those pollutants through something called zero discharge in a process called urban watershed cleaning and won an award from US EPA for the creation of those methods and that company went on and became successful, legalized and legitimized the industry and set new standards.
As that business became more successful, I was immersed in cities and counties and communities where the cities and counties, the states, the nonprofits had brought a lot of the money together. Many of these were big solar projects. Yeah. Where the communities have brought a lot of money together, but not all the money. They needed a little bit of gap financing to get fully funded and off the shelf and into the communities. You guys will know that a lot of these solar projects were stuck over very small amounts. People in search of either the renewable energy tax credit or the offsets.
And we brought in funding without any of those demands. And we were able to get some projects that would not otherwise happen to happen. So anyway, I was immersed in these communities and started the origins of Ecomedia as a nonprofit. And the idea was that I would, since I knew where these projects were, I was going to win grants and fill these gaps and get these projects done. Well, we started winning grants and started filling gaps. And I realized very quickly that we were running grants and very deserving nonprofits. We were taking a grant out of an existing foundation pie.
Those grants would have gone to another really capable nonprofit doing important work. And what was worse than that was that some of these nonprofits were being run by my friends. My friends were the executive directors and they said, hey, Paul, we think what you’re doing is really cool, but you know you’re competing with us now, which was not my intention. Nonprofits ironically end up zero sum in that way. Yeah, right. And these are my friends. And so through a series of observations and accidents, I saw the hundreds of billions of dollars spent advertising the American public.
And I thought, you know, I wonder if there’s an opportunity to add social impacts to the sale of this very commoditized product called, you know, a 30-second ad unit. And what if brands could get efficient and effective media delivery of their calls to action around their products or services, but at the same time accomplish social impacts that drive business value for them on a series of other issues, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and the like. And so started that company outside of CBS and started Ecomedia where I would buy ad time, apply our social impact services, and then resell it at a premium.
And I was buying CBS ad inventory. And they saw that we were bringing new clients to buying CBS that had never bought CBS before because of what we were doing. And we were bringing advertisers in to buy advertising during a time when they weren’t really in the market buying advertising. It was out of sequence because these are sometimes seasonal kinds of things where they come into the market and they buy and sometimes they don’t. And we were coming in at odd times. And CBS was looking at this going, whoa, he’s doing something to our raw material, our 30-second ad unit that is making it more compelling for buyers.
And I think I’m going to stop there and just sort of explain. Over 20 years ago, and my career since then has really been based on one sort of central concept or one central idea. And that is that a seller... In a commoditized competitive marketplace that applies social impacts to the sale of their product will differentiate themselves from sellers that don’t and bring more value to buyers. They’ll attract new customers and bigger spends from existing customers by adding social impacts to their offering. It’s social impacts as a differentiator. The fact is that social impacts as a sales incentive are more valuable to sellers and more valuable to buyers than other sales incentives that go back and forth between them.
It was more valuable to the buyer, the advertising buyer, than just giving them a free spot because they got their advertising plus all these social impacts that they were able to drive additional business value on. So that was the idea more than 20 years ago. And through CBS, we were purchased by CBS in 2010. But leading up to that, and you guys I think will really appreciate this on the renewable energy side and the climate side, is that we entered into a joint venture in 2008 and 2009 with CBS. Where we were selling ad units, just ad campaigns to green schools all over the country.
We were funding solar panels at these schools, doing energy efficiency retrofits, planting organic gardens, teaching kids how to grow their own food, cook their own food. We were attaching STEM education to these solar projects so that students could see why The solar panels produced more energy in May rather than in December, right? Some really cool science projects associated with it. We did this all over the country. We’re also using the sale of 30-second ad time to fund solar installations on parks, libraries, city halls. The city of Miami City Hall became the first big city city hall to be powered by renewable energy and was all underwritten by ads.
Not one taxpayer dollar. Not one. It was all underwritten through the sale of Advertising Time. That joint venture won the 2009 Award of Excellence from the US Conference of Mayors for being the number one public-private partnership in the nation. And CBS grew interested in buying Ecomedia. We were purchased in 2010. We’ve since become one of the fastest growing divisions of CBS. We have directed money to more than 250 nonprofits. We have funded well over 700 projects. We have directed more than $100 million and positively impacted the lives of 60 million people, more than 60 million people.
So the idea of applying social impacts as a sales incentive leading to more sales and leading to more tangible, measurable social impact is not aspirational or conceptual. It’s a functioning business model and it’s working beautifully. So in segwaying into sort of the new business that I’m involved with, give with, which is a social impact technology platform where we are sort of transforming commerce. We’re advancing social impact through business. We’re taking the idea of applying social impacts as a sales incentive. To industries far beyond media. There’s nothing unique about CVS. There’s nothing unique about a media seller or a media buyer.
The fact is you can apply social impacts to differentiating any seller and giving more value to any buyer. So GiveWith is a social impact technology platform and we’re transforming commerce. And when you look at where the money is, I mean, I want you guys to think about, you know, the fact is, is that As sacrilegious as it sounds, the advertising business isn’t that big. It’s a $500 billion business annually, globally, $500 billion, right? I mean, you know, the United States government spends more than $500 billion on defense every year. I mean, it’s like, you know, it’s like, it’s not that large of an interest.
And if you can leverage social impacts or you can leverage transactions, I should say, To bring new resources to taking on the most pressing issues of our time. Why not export that to where real money goes down? In business-to-business transactions, we’re talking about some $15 trillion. So if you can leverage transactions to bring new money to taking on the most pressing issues of our time, don’t go where the billions are, go where the trillions are. And that’s where we are now, which is taking our proven model and using technology to expand it beyond media and to take it globally.
And it’s a very exciting time. Very exciting time.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Some of our friends work in impact investing. And I went to a lunch not too long ago with them in Seattle. And one of the things that they always come back to is... These ESG ratings, environment.
Unknown speaker: What’s ESG, Ross?
Ross Kenyon: I’m way ahead of you. Environmental, social, governance.
Paul Polizzotto: Yeah, that’s right. Environmental, social, governance.
Ross Kenyon: This is the metrics that’s applied to how well a company meets these goals and those areas. It seems like a cost to companies but it seems like what you’re saying is oftentimes it can actually be a source of revenue and part of that is that people use it as a proxy. If I see that you are investing in these things it means You face less strategic risk because your company probably isn’t exploiting workers in some way that’s going to lead to a lawsuit or some sort of environmental catastrophe. And that is potentially a signal that you are behaving responsibly in ways that we can’t necessarily...
And so if a brand doesn’t do something that is making the world a better place, next to one Yeah, that’s at the B2C level, right?
Christophe Jospe: Where consumers are sort of voting with their wallets.
Paul Polizzotto: Yeah, I think that’s very important. But as it relates to ESG, right? We’re talking about social impact investing. We’re talking about some $26 trillion and that number might be dated because this area is really expanding very quickly. But as you pointed out, these investors... And what a lot of these investment firms do is they take in this information and they kind of So, they use these rating systems as a way to guide their thinking. And what we’re demonstrating is that there are some very fundamental business activities that have the capacity to influence or improve those numbers, right?
I mean, you may have read, you know, three or four months ago, it could be five months now. It’s been a while. But Larry Fink, who’s the CEO of BlackRock, came out and said, you know, with their $6 trillion that, you know, they were going to be very cautious about their investments based on performance, you know, the positive impacts that these companies are having in the world. There’s that side of the equation. And then the other thing I’m worried about is the opposite, which are these activist investors, right? That say, okay, which is the average company in the Fortune 100 spends $60 million on CSR, half of which is foundation and in kind, but $30 million, let’s say, or some high 20s are...
So if you’re an activist investor, you say, wait a minute, I’m unclear how the money you’re spending being a good guy and doing positive things in the world is actually positively influencing share price, right? What we’re doing with our platform is demonstrating that dollars spent in this area can not only drive sales, improve profits, but positively influence share price through improving ESG. So We really want to address both sides of that sort of challenge, right? You’ve got SRI or, you know, social responsible investing or social impact investing, and you’ve got these activist investors.
And our platform really, I think, speaks to both sides and says, look, how can we demonstrate that? Let’s go back to CBS for a second. At CBS, Ecomedia was used to help CBS sell more than they were already selling. Network TV, local TV at the time, radio and outdoor, those divisions have since been spun. And digital, right? They used social impacts to sell more of what they were already selling. And that can be applied basically to anything. And we turned what was a cost center, corporate social responsibility, sustainability from a cost center into a revenue generator.
The fact is that can be done for anyone. There’s nothing unique about CBS. There’s nothing unique about what was happening between Ecomedia and CBS that won’t allow any of these companies to turn these activities from cost centers into revenue generators.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a very nice motivational technique too. I’m sure some of these companies said, oh, well, we just don’t have it in the budget this year and you’re able to turn it around on them.
Paul Polizzotto: We turn around on it because you have a platform that says to CEOs and to the C-suite and to senior executives, we have a platform that’s going to help you lift your sales, improve your profits and positively influence your share price. There’s not a C-suite that’s going to turn you away. I mean, I really can’t make it any more succinct and simple as that. I mean, really, it’s about social impacts are a way to drive business value and this leads me to kind of talk about sort of the state of what’s happening in the nonprofit world, right?
So the nonprofit world is really based on an ask, right? Nonprofits are asking for money. And if you give them money, they’ll do positive things in the world, right? The problem with that is, one, I’m worried about donor fatigue. Everybody’s figured out a clever way to ask you for money. And there’s a finite amount of it. And my concern is that the issues have never been more pressing than they are right now. And we need to go beyond this sort of $400 billion. And I think if you strip out religion, the number would go down quite significantly.
But you got this $400 billion that is being directed to nonprofits throughout the country. The fact is the American public is quite generous, you know, and I think the most in the world. Yeah. When you look at some $281 billion, I might be off by a few, but just shy of $300 billion is being given by individuals. About $19. 5 billion came from corporations. What’s interesting about that is the folks with the least amount of money gave the most amount of money and the people with the most amount of money gave the least amount of money.
Here’s what I would say. I don’t believe that corporations are obligated to give nonprofits money. I think it’s incumbent upon us, I’m pointing at myself, to create ideas, innovations that show corporations that by addressing these pressing issues, by serving the needs of the underserved, that they can lift their sales, profits, and share price. They’re all in. I think that’s what we need to do. We need to show corporations that we can drive their business success. And if you can treat it like that, corporations are all in. Because that’s really what they’re in the business of doing.
And I respect that. I really do. I respect that. And so, I’ve been very conscious of what it means to bring ideas that are scalable and sustainable and drive business success. And if you do that, then you get a seat at the table with these large corporations. And I think the other thing that happens in that equation is we’ve turned what is an ask into an offer. We go to corporations and say, we’re not asking for anything. We’re not asking you to sell your product. You already do that. We’re not asking you to advertise.
You already do that. We’re offering you an opportunity to derive more value and more business success out of those activities by including social impacts. So these nonprofits are not beggars with their hands out. They’re your business partner. These nonprofits are a pathway for you to grow your sales and your profits and positively influence the share price, both for you and the buyer of your product or service. And so we’re trying to create a new form of fundraising for nonprofits that is more offer-based. That doesn’t mean it’s replacing the ask. It’s not replacing what they’re already doing, but it’s bringing new sources of revenues.
So all of the work that we do It’s not charity. It’s not philanthropy. We’re underwriting social impacts by harnessing business activities. It’s not charity. The grants that we’re writing to these nonprofits are not registered with the IRS as if we’re a foundation, you know, or. Nonprofits are essentially our third-party contractors. And they’re our third-party contractors because they happen to be the best qualified and the best suited to address these issuers. That’s the nature of their business.
Paul Gambill: I love this. We are so philosophically aligned on the idea of creating value out of doing something really good. And I’m really, really excited to see we’ve... It’s been about a year since we were here last time to meet with you. And like the progress that you’ve made and what you showed us before we started recording this is truly astounding. I’m really, really excited to see where you’re going with this.
Paul Polizzotto: Thanks, Paul. Appreciate it. You know, it’s immensely gratifying. Here’s what I would tell you is that and you see, you know, you got a sense for how much progress we made in such a short period of time. Is that being a social entrepreneur is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that you find it immensely gratifying. The curse is you can never shut it off. I’m always trying to think of new ways to bring new resources to improving the environment, health and education around the world now. And that creates a sense of urgency.
It never stops. It never, ever, ever stops. And that’s why you’ve seen such enormous progress in such a short period of time.
Christophe Jospe: Wow. So, great idea. Great execution. It’s essentially you’re like a special kind of matchmaker. But what conditions exist today that makes this possible? Or do you think the same idea could have happened 10 years ago? Or do you think there’s...
Paul Polizzotto: No, I think those are good questions. Yeah, I think there’s something special about right now. I mean, to your point, ESG, I mean, this is all very new. It’s quite nascent, you know, this whole idea of environmental, social, and governance ratings. And I think really society looking to corporations to be, you know, more socially involved. So I think there’s that. And technology, I mean, you know, what I shared with you guys before we started recording was a technology platform. You know, our ability to apply precision to the measurement of the business value associated with the social impacts that are carried out through our platform.
It’s just not possible without technology. The rating systems, many of those rating systems didn’t exist 10 years ago. So our ability to match up social impacts with rating systems where they can have business value. So what we’re doing is we’re directing dollars where they can have the greatest social impact. We’re verifying and validating those impacts. We’re reporting them and then applying them where they have business value. And you have to be quite precise about that. And the only way you can do that is through technology. So there’s a lot of things that are going on now that make what we’re doing more precise.
However, the business model of applying social impacts to the sale of something in a commoditized competitive marketplace. Of course, that’s not new. I’ve been doing that for more than 20 years. But we can apply business value to that transaction that I couldn’t – when I started years ago, I couldn’t tell you what that social impact was going to do relative to your ESG rating or whether that social impact – SASB or you know this is a sustainable accounting kinds of standards where they determine whether or not that’s material to your business in some way.
We didn’t have that ability.
Paul Gambill: It’s like the difference like you could run an ad in a magazine and you don’t really know. Yeah.
Paul Polizzotto: Yeah, you know what, Paul, you bring up an interesting point about advertising. Advertising is really a step removed from the transaction. I mean, everybody who’s selling advertising is trying to sort of tell you what part of the funnel they were in terms of what led up to your purchasing that product, right? We can debate that all day long. But what we’re doing with GiveWith is by putting ourselves at the transaction. What’s happening in society. The reason why the event at the United Nations when we launched Give With to the Public, we were already operating, but we launched Give With at the United Nations on April 10th.
And the conference was called Transforming Commerce, Advancing Social Paths for Business. Was that thought came to me and I was really struggling with how successful we’ve become, how adept we’ve become, effective we’ve become at flipping industries. Just flipping them on their heads. You know, you’ve got Airbnb, you’ve got Uber and you’ve got Netflix and you’ve got literally there are household name companies on the outside looking in, right? Just going, what happened? Right. And we’ve become really successful at that. And then you look at society and society looks the same as it’s ever looked.
It looks stuck. It looks broken. And really what we were trying to say is what if we brought all the same level of creativity and innovation to these stuck societal structures and said, what if we could flip it? What if we could sort of flip this whole paradigm? And here’s what I mean by this. I’ll try to draw it out verbally since we’re doing this while we have a recording. But if you look at the gross, this is the top of the box, right? This is the top. It’s commerce. It’s essentially commerce, right?
And that’s the gross line. And in the United States, it’s a $19 trillion, $20 trillion economy, okay? And that’s really governed... Buy sales, profits, and share price. Okay. That’s the gross line. And people and businesses are involved in the gross activities of commerce. The next line down is the net line. Okay. So people and businesses pay taxes to government. Mm-hmm. And then government then does some job of redistributing the money they take in from people and businesses to people less fortunate down on the net net line, the last line, right?
We can all argue whether or not government does a good job of that. But nonetheless, also on the net line are people and businesses with the money they get to keep that they didn’t give to government. And as we talked about earlier, people are quite generous. You know, at the end of the year, they sort of look at what they have and they say, you know, we paid our mortgage and college for our kids. And, you know, do we have any money left over to give to people less fortunate than ourselves?
And, you know, American public was very generous. And then you’ve got corporations, as I said earlier, gave $19. 5 billion. That’s from the net line to the net net line. What we have here, guys, is that people in need and the most pressing issues of our time are last in line. They’re last in line. And you’ve got 27 million Americans or so without health insurance. You’ve got 40 million Americans living below the poverty line. You’ve got 5 million youth either not in school or not employed. They’re just disengaged. You’ve got some really – and then, of course, not to mention what’s happening with climate change and where we stand on that.
And you say, wow, what’s going to change? The only way it’s going to change is if you take people in these issues that are last in line and take them and put them on the top line, right? To put people in need and to put the most pressing issues of our time at the center of a transaction, at the gross level. The $100 million that I talked about directing to nonprofits through CBS Ecomedia did not go through trickle down. Trickle down isn’t working. It’s not working. Too many layers of middlemen.
Transaction costs are high. Inefficient, ineffective, not working. Not available. Certainly not working fast enough, right? So that $100 million, more than $100 million that we’ve directed came from the gross line. It wasn’t as if CBS sold the ad inventory, made a profit, paid their taxes, and then sent the money to the nonprofits. It happened at the gross level. There was no trickle down. What if we could put the most pressing issues of our time at the center of a transaction between a seller and a buyer? That the reason why a buyer said yes to a seller was that we were taking on the most pressing issues of our time and serving the underserved.
Well, that would only work if we could demonstrate that there was business value associated with it. It helped the seller sell, gave more value to the buyer. How do you do that? That’s what GiveWit does through its technology platform and says, how does that influence the ESG ratings of both the companies? And CDP, Carbon Disclosure Project, GRI, Global Reporting Initiative, the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. What does it mean to recruiting and retention and investor relations and a number of other issues? And if you can show how that transaction created additional value for both the seller and the buyer in these very specific areas, Well, then we can move the most pressing issues of our time from net-net, last in line, to first in line.
And what that means, guys, is now all of a sudden these issues have a 90%. So I think what you get by moving everyone to the gross line is you all of a sudden get access to a $19-20 trillion checking account, which is a lot more compelling, I think, for taking on these issues than the scarce resources that are now available.
Paul Gambill: I love what you’re talking about and the way that you’re talking about the analysis and the ratings and the scores. Like when I’m out talking with investors right now about our fundraising that we’re doing and trying to convince them that yes, there are corporations that are lined up. I’m pointing to these things and saying, look, there is a lot of evidence out there that is showing that these companies that invest in these sorts of things are more profitable. And it’s because they’re attracting better customers and better talent and they’re creating better relationships with their business partners.
Paul Polizzotto: Well, I think there’s a lot of encouraging things going on. I mean, I know that sounds crazy right now because these are crazy times. But what I would say is, look, I don’t want to oversimplify it, but it seems to me that for the first time... The federal government is actually reducing environmental regulations and companies are going in the opposite direction. More companies are pledging to source 100% of their energy for renewables. You see the climate group and those RE100 and the folks who’ve chosen to source 100% of their energy for renewables.
All the while, environmental regulations are being relaxed and corporations are saying, no, we’re going to go in the other direction, which to me is really encouraging. You know, it’s...
Paul Gambill: And like you say, there’s so much more opportunity there than has ever been in the past. Like the potential impact that you’re talking about has never before been possible. Yeah.
Paul Polizzotto: Yeah. Well, and applying business value to that impact. You know, how does carrying out those activities as a corporation – Build my brand value and help me lift my sales and my profits and my share price. And I think as long as we continue to focus on those issues as it relates to corporations, then we get a chance to play in that $19, $20 trillion checking account. If we’re going to stay in that ask kind of world and be on the fringe, then we’re going to be last in line.
Ross Kenyon: What do you do with, I don’t want to be a gloomy Gus, but sometimes when I see corporations doing things that have some sort of social value, I think of, you know, the Hooli table commercial in Silicon Valley. Have you ever seen that TV show?
Paul Polizzotto: No.
Ross Kenyon: Well, it’s like whenever a company talks about what a great thing they’re doing, I just assume it’s greenwashing or kind of stupid until it’s proven otherwise. Is there a good way to vet this or know that this is actually not just window dressing?
Paul Polizzotto: Yeah. No, I think you bring up a good point. I personally believe cause marketing is dead. Cause marketing as we know it, as it currently is carried out, is in my view dead.
Unknown speaker: Can you explain what that means?
Paul Polizzotto: What I mean is that it’s a one-way monologue between a brand and a consumer. It’s like, look at all these great things we’re doing. And they’re historical. They’re things that have been done in the past, right? Here’s what we did in the past. And being from the environmental space like I am, I would listen to these corporations say, We reduced our solid waste by 30%. You know, you’re seeing it and you go, congratulations.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, it sounds like you’re saving money.
Paul Polizzotto: Yeah, exactly. What does that got to do with me and my community and the things we’re challenged with?
Unknown speaker: I’m having a tough time with that.
Paul Polizzotto: Exactly. But I think what you’re bringing up is if you can demonstrate that through either a consumer brand transaction or through a consumer brand transaction, Conversation through advertising. Something new in the future happens as a result of us agreeing as brand and consumer and something new and additive happens in the world that’s real and tangible and measurable. Well, then I think that’s interesting. You know, I’ll give you an example through Give With Advertising, right? The Give With Advertising side. You know, we’re working with Dell and Dell came out with their new XPS, their 13-inch laptop.
And 25% of the packaging in the new XPS is made from Motion Plastics, which I think is super cool and takes me back to my roots of the oceans. And I said to them, I said, you know, wouldn’t it be cool if every time you told the consumer your product was made from ocean plastics, we actually funded a nonprofit that was actually removing ocean plastics and repurposing those ocean plastics. Talk about it and do it in real time. And when you and the consumer agree, right? I mean, there are studies that show that by 2050, at least by weight, there’ll be more plastic in the ocean than fish, which is just stunning, right?
The place from which all life spawned, from which all life was born. That’s 6,000 years ago, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, to me, when the consumer and the brand agree, great things happen for brands. And that’s future looking. That’s forward looking. And then that gives the consumer an opportunity to trigger an act on the part of the consumer. So, that campaign, which was quite successful, by the way, didn’t involve anything. Dell asking the consumer to donate, they didn’t ask the consumer for any money. They asked the consumer if they cared. They asked the consumer if they agreed.
And in fact, if you agree, then I’ll underwrite it, right? I’ll underwrite the fact that we agree. So, they weren’t asking the consumer for money. They were asking the consumer if they cared. And I think that is really interesting is where brands and consumers agree and new things happen in the world as a result. That to me is authentic, right? It’s story, empathy, action in real time. And when brands underwrite human empathy, great things happen for brands. And so look, brands are going to continue to try to reach us and inform us about their products and services and try to engage us in And learning more.
And I think that’s fine. That’s how the world works. But what if those conversations, conversations between brands and consumers and media companies and viewers could result in new and additive positive social impacts in the world that weren’t otherwise going to happen? We can harness human energy. We can harness human communication. And that’s not aspirational or conceptual. That’s a functioning business model. That’s called CBS Ecomedia Giveaway. That already works. I mean, the fact is, is that we’ve Harnessed ads that have long since been forgotten into housing for homeless veterans and solar panels on, you know, city halls and libraries and schools and, you know, into funding, you know, college educations for kids, teaching girls of color to learn coding skills through black girls code.
I mean, just on and on and on. The fact is you can harness an ad and just an ad.
Christophe Jospe: I hope you don’t get offended, Paul, but I think some of what you do inspired our business model because we do think of, okay, well, on the one hand, we’re talking about carbon, right? You emit carbon, but consumers want that carbon to go away. If a brand can say, I’m going to take care of that for you. Well, that consumer is just going to love the brand all that much more. And so, the question is like, how do we connect the dots in the most efficient way? And that’s what GiveWit seems to be doing.
And that’s what you seem to be doing by shifting that framing around.
Paul Polizzotto: Yeah, I’m not offended at all. In fact, I’m honored and I’m flattered. Look, I think what we have to do, just as I was saying earlier about transforming commerce and bringing innovators and, you know, creative people together to rethink things. If anything that we’re doing can positively impact other people’s thinking, I mean, that’s how we get scale. And so, my hope is that... We’ll encourage the next generation of bright business minds to think about business models that employ people, put people to work, but at the same time positively impact people’s lives.
And I’m really encouraged. I’m optimistic. I believe in the minds of this next generation are the innovations, the ideas, the methods, the processes for us to live here more sustainably. I think we’re an incredibly creative species and I’m optimistic that we can come together. I also think we’re super resilient. It’s going to be tough to kill us off. So look, I do agree that there’s no plan B. This is it. This is what we And this is such an incredibly special planet. Like I just marvel every day that it sits on its axis and it tilts and you’ve got, you know, trade winds and you’ve got currents and how this thing heats and cools and it’s just so beautiful, right?
And, you know, here we’ve got all this new technology and we’re looking out at neighboring stars and we see, you know, that planets, you know, orbiting stars is not At all unusual. In fact, it’s quite typical. But to date, we haven’t found a planet that’s quite like ours. This one is really, really special. And when I think about people going to Mars, I’m like, Mars? Yeah. The Arctic makes Mars look, I mean, the Arctic is hospitable. I mean, like, what are we talking about? How about we just protect this, right?
And anyway, I’m not suggesting that I’m a big proponent of space travel, so don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to go to Mars. I want to go beyond. And I want to see those planets orbiting other stars that are just like ours. I mean, I hope in my lifetime, if we can’t get there, I can at least see them in pictures. That to me is something I’m really...
Ross Kenyon: Did you look at those New Horizons Pluto photos? Have you seen those when they came out a couple of years ago?
Paul Polizzotto: No. Is that a look back?
Ross Kenyon: You probably would recognize if you saw it, but yeah, they’re really stunning. It’s hard to overstate how cool that is when you see it.
Paul Polizzotto: Yeah. It’s incredible. So, I’m all about space travel, but I’m all about really knowing what we know about neighboring stars and planets orbiting those neighboring stars. We got a really good one here, you know?
Ross Kenyon: It’s pretty good. We should cut it off before we take that information and turn it into the threat to the human race, which is also looming because we’re trying to be optimistic. We typically are, but I could sense a change in the air currents in the room.
Unknown speaker: So any last thoughts?
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. I want to throw one more question back at you, Paul. What advice would you give to social entrepreneurs trying to change the world?
Paul Polizzotto: I would say paddle out, paddle out. And I will tell you, because this actually comes from something that I said, although I’m a graduate of UCLA, I’m now involved at USC’s Marshall School of Business. And there’s an area of the business school called Brittingham, where they have the first master’s program in social entrepreneurship in the country. They’re just doing some really cool stuff. This guy, Adley Wirtman, who was the founder of that program and took it to USC. Incredible. So anyway, because I’m from Southern California, I go in to guest lecture in a class and you walk in and everybody’s in shorts and flip-flops and they look like we did when we were in school, surfers.
And so we’re in there and we start talking and I said, I’m not sure necessarily, the jury’s still out, whether or not we can actually teach entrepreneurship. I think we can teach you fundamental business skills that maybe might make you more successful as entrepreneurs, but I’m not sure you can teach that sort of instinct of an entrepreneur. But with that said, I said, you know, when I was young, there was no such thing as the internet, right? We would go on surf trips and we would go for two weeks down into Baja.
We’d get down there and it would be flat, right? And we’d sit on these dusty cliffs and we’d be flat. We wouldn’t surf for two weeks. We just picked the wrong weights. We just got skunked. But that doesn’t happen anymore. Now you have the internet and you get buoy readings and swell information as far south as New Zealand. So you just don’t go. It’s not going to be any swell. So I was telling these students, I said, you know, one night more recently, I said, we... This friend of mine, you know, got on online and got some buoy readings.
And he comes in from the other room and he goes, look at this. He shows the buoy readings and he shows where waves were going to be the biggest. And it was north of Los Angeles in this area called Oxnard, what we call Hollywood by the Sea or Silver Strand. And we’re super excited. Oh, yeah, this is going to be great. So, we wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning. We drive through the dark and we get there and the sun’s coming up. And I said to the students, I said, so...
What did the technology give us? Half the kids, it was flat. I said, no, no, no, no. It was massive, right? The technology gave us exactly what we thought it was going to give us. So, I grabbed my wetsuit and I grabbed my board and my friend says to me, what are you doing? I go, I’m going surfing. He goes, we’re not going out there. Are you out of your mind? Now, was I scared? Oh, yeah. I was really scared. I was really scared. But I jumped in the water and started paddling.
I got thrown around like a rag doll. I was just a little scared and tossed and thrown around. But I made my way out. I flipped around and took off and had one of the most unbelievable surf sessions of my life. And so I said to these students, I said, you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t brilliant. This is a world-class institution you’re in. And you’re surrounded by these amazing professors and you’re designing these incredible business plans. Let me ask you a question. What happens if the technology gives you exactly what you set out for?
Will you paddle out? Okay. Cause you can’t ride waves sitting on the beach. You got to paddle out and you will get thrown around like a rag doll. And, you know, unfortunately people can drown out there. It’s scary. But you can’t ride waves sitting on the beach. And when you take that plunge and you paddle out, you can have one of the most incredible journeys of your life. And so what I would say to young entrepreneurs is paddle out. Paddle out knowing that it can be big and dangerous and scary, but you can also have one of the most amazing journeys and experiences of your life.
And so... I’ve now dedicated a lot of time to business schools because as I said, through that optimism, through the minds, the next generation of bright business minds, I want to share my experiences of paddling out and that I was just as scared as anyone else. There’s nothing, you know, I’m... You know, I know that journey, but and if I can share any of my experiences to give them the courage to paddle out or give them some insights on ways that they can have a better journey, a better surf session, then I would love to be a resource.
Are you satisfied, Christophe?
Christophe Jospe: Very satisfied. Total kindred spirit. Well, thanks, Paul. See you next time.
Paul Polizzotto: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
