All hail St Keith. Now we have to see how it works in real life

It’s good to see an advertiser like Unilever acknowledge the wider role it plays in society, writes Dominic Mills – but how will its CMO’s words be translated into real-world actions? Here’s the nitty-gritty

If Marc Pritchard lobbed a giant rock into the murky pool of digital at the IAB gathering a year ago, his rival/peer, Unilever CMO Keith Weed, did likewise last week.

The difference is that Weed has moved the debate on, from something narrow and focused only on advertiser needs, to a much wider societal issue.

I like Mark Ritson’s characterisation of Pritchard’s speech as one wearing a tie and carrying a calculator. If we stick with that analogy, Weed’s speech brandished its Glastonbury access-all-areas pass and wore a pair of open-toed sandals.

Let me repeat the key passage in Weed’s speech: “Unilever will not invest in platforms of environments that do not protect children or which create division in society and promote anger or hate. We will prioritise investing only in responsible platforms that are committed to creating a positive impact on society.”

You can read the key extracts here.

Not everyone is with Weed on this (including Mark Ritson), but I am. It’s good to see advertisers acknowledging the wider role they have in society, and recognising that, via the media choices they make, they can contribute to a public good – or indeed, make the world a worse place.

So much for the bigger picture. But Weed’s words will have to be translated into actions. And in real life, what do they mean?

So, as we get down into the area where the grit is at its nittiest, a number of questions and issues suggest themselves. In no particular order, they are:

Who decides? Someone has to interpret Unilever’s intentions and make hard decisions about what to exclude and what to include. What might seem like a black-and-white area suddenly becomes grey and murky. But someone has to make the choices. Is that Unilever? Or does it leave it to its agencies, principally GroupM in this case. Lucky them.

What exactly constitutes an environment that does not protect children or which creates divisions, anger or hate? It’s hard, isn’t it? One individual’s trolling is another’s robust debate. One strongly expressed opinion (just think of the Stop Funding Hate’s campaign against the Daily Mail and advertisers who use it) is another’s incitement to hate. Value judgements will have to be made. Advertisers traditionally steer clear of this, and you can see why.

Following on from this, what happens when it goes wrong? Weed, no doubt fully aware of this possibility, has set a high bar and therefore made a big rod for his employer’s back. The cynics will be ready to pounce at the first sign of a mistake, and from there on Unilever may well be on the back foot. Has Unilever inadvertently opened the door to social activists to encourage boycotts of its products? One thing you can be sure of: when the first mistake happens, the sound of arse-covering will be loudest.

Blacklist or whitelist? Does Unilever work form the basis of actively excluding platforms, or actively including them? Either way, it is a ton of work – and permanently ongoing at that – in which someone will have to make nuanced and subjective judgements. (As a by the way, I heard recently of a client which decided to blacklist Breitbart and asked its agency to do the necessaries. Only some poor agency sap mistyped the name Brietbart. Cue anger all round when the ads continued to appear on the right-wing site.)

Hate sites vs news sites. Last week the Home Office made available to platforms the services of an outfit called ASI Data Sciences, whose AI product it is claimed can detect Isis hate material with 95% accuracy. Good. ASI also revealed that Isis used some 145 platforms to promote its message. Not so good. Who knew there were so many? And the BBC demonstrated that the software sometimes failed to differentiate between Isis hate sites and news sites reporting on Isis and its videos. Bad. All of which reminds us just how messy this can be.

Focusing on regulated media. One answer might be for Unilever to restrict its advertising only to those platforms and sites that are regulated, and therefore answerable to the law or a higher authority. But if it does that, how much does its restrict its choice?

Moral high-ground versus scale versus cost. Excluding certain platforms will have consequences in terms of scale and reach, as well as potentially cost. Unilever has always set a high bar on areas like brand safety and viewability – and thus understands the implications of such restrictions – but this move adds a further twist. Will there be a point at which the penalties of diminished reach and less available inventory carry a cost Unilever is not prepared to pay?

Is Amazon the big winner? One reading of Unilever’s move is that Amazon – which has the scale (there are more product searches on Amazon than Google) and is, to all intents, a protected environment, will be the principal beneficiary. That’s interesting, because at the same time Amazon and its own-label ambitions constitute a threat, not just to Unilever, but to many packaged goods companies. The monster may have just have been given an extra dose of steroids.

Media planning. I have no idea how this will work out, but I am sure it will have an impact on the way Unilever plans its spend. The most likely outcome is that the balance between audience-first and context-led planning will shift in favour of the latter – possibly accelerating the trend anyway. Audience-first means you chase the audience wherever it is – which is one reason why the eco-system is in the mess it’s in – and (more or less) ignore the consequences of unsafe environments and so on.

Context-led goes the other way, prioritising location or environment. I don’t think it’s a binary choice, but we shall see.

So there you have it. You may see other issues, and please let me know if you do.

Weed has set Unilever on a long road. I’m sure he will have prepared for every eventuality, but equally it is highly likely something will bite him in the arse. He will no doubt be hoping other advertisers join him on the route.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Let’s hope instead this particular road leads to the sunny uplands.