Take some responsibility
The stink hanging over Ad Week Europe last year was YouTube’s brand safety debacle, and – as if by design – this year the bad smell was choking the other half of the duopoly.
Although, what Facebook has got itself into – and the wider implications of its actions and inactions – is much worse.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal dominated many of the conversations we had with delegates at the annual media event, and it did make its way into some of the debates we attended too – but it was frustrating (although not surprising) that Facebook’s actual stage time was such a superficial affair (starring The X-factor’s Nicole Scherzinger).
How very different was the tone from Google this year, which is now talking very openly about its faults, its challenges and the ways it wishes to work with industry.
“We hear you when you say you want transparency, you want safety, you want fraud protection,” said the tech giant’s EMEA president Matt Brittin during his time on stage.
“We hear you when you say you worry about programmatic advertising, its transparency, its complexity, the range of intermediaries.”[advert position=”left”]
As one half of the duopoly, Google must now be at pains to distance itself from Facebook’s growing toxicity.
On Thursday morning in London, as Ad Week was preparing to wind down, Facebook’s chief, Mark Zuckerberg, finally offered a statement (devoid of an actual apology to users and investors), in which he announced a plan of action to try and stop these sorts of breaches happening again, while pledging to ban third-party developers that won’t agree to audit and set up a new approval system.
However, Nick Manning, ex-Ebiquity chief, told Mediatel that what Facebook has pledged should be “just a start”.
“The idea that Facebook is ‘just a platform’ is no longer tenable,” he says. “It has to accept that it has the same responsibilities as a media owner/publisher, or face regulation.”
Manning added that Facebook will now need to find a position that satisfies the public first, and advertisers second – or face user loss and the consequences of advertiser defection.
Meanwhile, ISBA’s chief, Phil Smith, representing the voice of the advertising clients, told Mediatel Facebook needs to get to the bottom of the issues and share any implications for the public and for advertisers.
“Advertisers will then be in a position to make their own decisions on the right response,” he said – and at the time of writing, some US-based advertisers, such as Mozilla, had withdrawn from Facebook (but given the platform’s power for advertising, it seems unlikely we’ll witness a lasting exodus).
Other senior media execs we spoke with were simply fed up with the total lack of responsibility.
“Enough of bumped audience figures, brand unsafety and egregious attitude towards UK tax,” ex-ISBA director and founder of Deconstruction, Bob Wootton, says. “And enough of fake news and now positively sinister undermining of society and democracy itself.”
While for Ray Snoddy, writing in his weekly column for Mediatel, the time is now long overdue for a judicial inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the social media and their effect on society.
As for us, we think the most important thing to take away from this is just how important it is to invest – with ad money, subscriptions, membership schemes or loose change at the newsagents – in the sort of media that is able to break and disseminate the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook story.
Investigative journalism is slow to produce, often risky to undertake and is bloody expensive, but without it we’ll be in all shades of trouble.