Apple TV’s luvvie hell; and the ASA funding crisis
There is nothing more depressing or dull than Hollywood luvvies talking about the creative process, writes Dominic Mills. Plus: how search advertising is strangling adland’s self-regulatory system
Bloody hell, those Hollywood luvvies certainly know how to torture us normals, especially when they’re being paid shedloads by Apple to ham it up for its new TV service.
I can’t do better than Tracy Follows’ brilliant description of Apple TV as ‘Woke TV’.
What I can point you to is the Apple film promoting its wares. Call this a giant ad for Apple TV+, although it bears no relation to the kind of Apple ads we’re used to seeing. These, while not always brilliant, are at least concise, have a point and are genuinely watchable.
But this five-minute, bloated, pompous, solipsistic, self-regarding, wank-athon is luvvie hell. It features, among others, Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Aniston and Ron Howard droning on and on and on about their ‘art’.
Here are three examples of the kind of speechifying that should be strangled at birth:
1. ‘I keep on wanting to stand on the edge of the abyss but at the same time not fall to my career death’. Go on, jump then.
2. ‘There’s truth pumping through your veins and into the story that you’re telling’. Er no, that’s self-delusion pumping through your veins.
3. ‘Everyone deserves to have their story told’. They most certainly do not.
Still, this ‘ad’ reminds us of a fundamental truth: there is nothing more depressing or dull than Hollywood luvvies talking about the creative process.
I’d love to have seen this film made by Apple’s agency of record, TBWA. If nothing else, it would have been short.
Crisis time for ASA funding
Like most people in adland, I suspect, I never thought too much about the inner workings of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). That was, at least, until someone complained about an ad we had once carried in Campaign and I had to deal with it.
It was absolutely no fun at all; I felt as though I had been summoned to the headmaster’s study.
But I came away with a huge respect for the ASA. The process was uncomfortable, but the ASA was nothing if not thorough, punctilious, professional and, in the end, fair. Ever since, I have looked at it in a different light, and over time I have come to see how critical a part it is of the advertising ‘body’ and the role it plays in protecting the good name of advertising.
If you continue with that body analogy, then the ASA are the industry’s kidneys, responsible for ridding it of waste and toxins.
But the ASA is facing a funding crisis, and it comes at a particularly acute time. First, its workload is increasing dramatically. Second, it is a central part of the industry’s plan to restore trust in advertising, as detailed here.
However, without the right level of funding, the ASA will itself face an uphill struggle to fulfil its remit, let alone restore public trust in advertising or, indeed, maintain the self-regulatory system that advertisers so zealously wish to preserve.
Good luck then to Mark Lund, boss of McCann UK, who this week takes over as chair of Asbof and Basbof, the two bodies that oversee the mechanism by which the ASA is funded. (Asbof stands for Advertising Standards Board of Finance, and Basbof for its broadcast advertising sister).
An industry veteran, respected inside the business and well-connected outside, Lund is ideally qualified for the role.
If the system sounds a bit alphabet soup, the process is actually simple — in theory. Mostly collected via agencies and media owners, advertisers pay a voluntary 0.1% of spend levy. This is passed on to Asbof, which then funds the ASA.
For years this system has worked well, and helped keep statutory regulation at arms length.
But not any more and Lund inherits from his predecessor, the equally well-qualified Sir Chris Powell, a thorny chalice. In his final chairman’s report, Powell lays out the nub of the problem: “It is a pity then that we still haven’t persuaded enough advertisers in what is now the biggest single segment of the media market — search — to pay the tiny levy that in aggregate pays for self-regulation.”
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This may reflect Powell’s typically understated style, but it also feels like a scream of frustration or, worse, pain.
The numbers substantiate the scale of the shortfall. Search represents about a third of the total ad market, but just 17% of Asbof’s income. Meanwhile, at the ASA, it represents just under 10% of the workload.
For comparison, Asbof’s collection rate on traditional media (i.e. OOH, broadcasting, press etc) is just over 70% — could be better, but not bad — while that from mail, thanks to a system introduced by Royal Mail, is close on 100%.
Why the problem in search? Well, increasingly search is bought direct and without a media agency sitting in the middle there is no formal way to collect the cash.
This trend isn’t going to reverse itself, and indeed is only likely to go the other way as more long-tail advertisers pile in to self-serve.
So why not get Google and Facebook to do the work? Google has done its best — note too that EMEA ads boss Mark Howe sits on the Asbof board, which might give board conversations a certain added piquancy — by setting up a system by which search advertisers can register to pay the levy.
I’m told that about between 30-40 have signed up so far, contributing £500,000 or so. But a) that’s a drop in the ocean and b) Asbof then has to chase them up, a task for which it is just not set up (it’s hardly likely to employ debt-collecting rottweilers), and was never meant to be anyway.
Facebook, for its part, just signs a cheque to Asbof every now and then but, according to my information, it’s about a third of what it should be.
You may conclude that, given the pair have as much interest in a healthy regulatory system as everyone else, their efforts are distinctly below par. In other aspects of adland — through representative bodies, for example — they’re happy to sit at the top table. But when it comes to protecting self-regulation, well…
As I understand, the UK managements of both grasp the problem, and may even be embarrassed by their failure to do more. The difficulty is that, in the scale of things, they are mere ‘branch offices’ and any change in their systems to standardise the levy collection has to be okayed by California HQs. There, they don’t give a monkey’s about something as ephemeral as UK ad regulation. As one insider commented to me: “There’s nothing in it for them at a global level to help us”.
And all the while, as the ASA workload increases — gambling, stereotyping, influencers and so on — the pressure mounts.
On top of this sits the broader battle to win public trust in advertising, pushed in part by an ad campaign like this to raise awareness of the ASA’s role.
I don’t doubt the sense of this, but it’s a double-edged sword: higher awareness increases the ASA workload at a time when its funding is falling short.
How long then is it before the system cracks? And what happens if it does? Mark Lund needs all the help, support and luck he can get.
Correction: This article was updated at 14:55 on 1 April. The original stated: “Search represents about a third of the total ad market, but just 17% of Asbof’s income. Meanwhile, at the ASA, it represents just under 40% of the workload.” Paid search actually accounts for less than 10% of the workload.