After Dominic Mills attacked the Advertising Association’s latest report, calling it a flawed and arrogant approach to defending the ad industry from attack, the AA’s CEO, Tim Lefroy, responds.
“Dishonest, flawed and arrogant.” That’s quite a charge-list.
I can only be thankful that Dominic Mills’ description applied not to me personally, nor even to the Advertising Association. That’s how he chose to describe a strategy of defending advertising by arguing that it funds our media.
And I agree. Asking people to “look over there!” at free-to-air telly, at the papers they read, at the radio they listen to and the online stuff they use is the wrong defence, and won’t rebuild trust in advertising.
But that’s not the game that we’re playing. And if only we’d invited Dominic to LEAD, he’d have realised that. Apologies, Dominic – next year’s ticket is already in the post.
A fundamental reason UK advertising is so successful – and its benefits are so wide-ranging – is that we enjoy the privilege of self-regulation. We ask the public to trust us to be legal, decent, honest and truthful – allowing us the freedom to speak to our customers, innovate, promote, enlighten, inspire, flog and entertain, responsibly, without clunky and heavy-handed statute.
But that’s not a privilege we will retain simply by pointing to advertising’s ability to keep Corrie on air for free.
We need to face up to the responsibility that comes with unleashing £20 billion worth of commercial communications on society every year. And those responsibilities, as Richard Eyre so eloquently stated at LEAD this year, are changing rapidly – just like everything else in our world.
That’s why our president, Andy Duncan, our chairman, Cilla Snowball, and the AA’s Council insisted that LEAD this year was focused on responsibility in advertising, not patting ourselves on the back for saving people a few hundred quid.
That won’t win us back the public’s trust. But collectively raising our game ethically might.
Which is precisely what advertising’s leaders agreed to do at LEAD – where we saw a confident, forward-looking set of industries with the courage to put competitive spirits aside, reflect for a morning, and mind our responsibilities.
But…
The reason we are able to take that breath and consider such a fundamental challenge, is thanks to Credos, our Front Foot group, and the cold, hard evidence provided by the Advertising Pays series: a trilogy of reports that are waking policy makers and commentators up to the fact that advertising is a critical component of a modern, healthy, capitalist democracy.
Advertising Pays showed our macro-economic impact: £16bn of adspend in 2011 returning over £100bn to the economy – making markets more efficient, saving people money through competition, making products and services better through innovation. Supporting half a million jobs.
Then the difficult second album, Advertising Pays 2 – evidence that advertising isn’t just a tool of big business, and offers huge growth opportunities to UK SMEs – which could grow the economy by another £30-odd-bn if they used advertising to help raise their export levels to the European average.
And this year, completing the story – the piece of the puzzle that Dominic has mistaken for our defence of advertising. Advertising Pays 3 shows what advertising does for people, by providing an unmatchable subsidy for culture, media and sport: keeping quality high, and barriers to access low.
Taken together, that’s a complete case for advertising, and it’s being made in Britain’s corridors of power so that when challenges to how we operate arise, decision makers have a more fundamental understanding of why advertising matters.
And it allows us to step back and be mindful of our responsibilities, from atop the high ground – not in the trenches of defence. It’s that agenda that will ensure we retain the privilege of self-regulation – and eventually, win back the public’s trust.
