Is Barb now the Advertisers’ Protection Society?
100% Media 0% Nonsense
Advertisers needed “protecting” 100 years ago, which is why we have JICs like Barb and trade bodies like Isba. How we define “protection” and “choice” will matter most as Origin formally launches next year.
The easiest way to smell a rat these days is when someone complains about something being “too woke”.
Kamala Harris, according to political pundits (who are always right), was “too woke”. Even though she lost what turned out to be a very close election (50-48, which pollsters regard as a statistical tie) and performed much better than Joe Biden (who was obviously “too old” despite being just three years older than Donald Trump).
The Paris Olympics were also woke “propaganda” according to some, for daring to include drag queens in the opening ceremony. Er, have you seen what has been taking place at the Moulin Rouge these past 100 years?
And then of course, that Jaguar ad, according to “the internet”, was “too woke” because it featured queer-looking people doing artistic things. Which is why everyone is talking about Jaguar, a mediocre car brand that had been mostly forgotten about outside middle-aged manlandia.
The problem is the word “woke” itself, which is an ill-defined concept.
Poor definitions allow mischief-makers and outrage-merchants to infect a concept with whatever poisonous meaning they want to get attention.
The cockapoo is the giveaway
As far as I understand, “woke” means having sensitivity and compassion for marginalised people in society. We used to call such behaviour “not being a dickhead”.
In the case of Jaguar, does “woke” mean “pro-gay rights”?
The MailOnline clearly thinks so; there’s no other way to interpret the headline of this story: “The American marketing guru who masterminded Jaguar’s woke rebrand: BLM-supporting executive from New York who lives with Scottish husband and their cockapoo Mia boasted of British car icon’s ‘transformative journey'”
OK… but so what? Is MailOnline against gay rights? Does its editorial team, or its readers, expect Jaguar not to be “pro-gay rights”?
Why is it actually relevant that Jaguar’s brand manager is, according to the article, proud of his sexuality and enthusiastic about aligning the brand with the freedom to express support for the LGBT+ community?
Or is that too much free speech for the people who won’t shut up about free speech?
Watch out for the change
Definitions can change over time, too, and this change is crucial to understanding what’s happening in our industry.
For example, what does it mean to protect advertisers in today’s online world? I was reminded of why advertiser trade body Isba came to exist over 100 years ago during a recent interview with Debbie Morrison, one of the industry’s pioneers of trust.
Morrison, an Isba stalwart and now retired, had built many of the foundations of contracts and standards by which advertisers, media owners and agencies interact in modern advertising and marketing.
Isba’s history is pithily detailed on its own website:
“Isba has been working for advertisers since 1891, when seven advertisers protesting dubious newspaper circulation figures got together. They needed to know how effective their advertising was and how many people were actually seeing the ads they paid for. The call was for ‘net sales’, not pulp circulation.
“The Advertisers’ Protection Society (APS), the original name of Isba, was formally established in 1900, which makes Isba the oldest advertiser organisation in the world.
“The APS took it upon itself to work out the number of newspapers being sold and was subsequently taken to court, charged with libel. It won its case, setting the industry on the road to audited media measurement.”
In other words, advertisers were being ripped off by news publishers, which were lying about how many people were seeing their ads.
Advertisers demanded a trusted system of measurement and accountability.
That became part of the fabric of UK advertising and media, and evolved into joint industry currencies (JICs) that set minimum standards, agreed on by a range of interests, giving buyers confidence that the ads they buy and the price they pay is built on solid foundations.
So it’s highly significant that Barb, the TV industry’s 40-year-old JIC and measurement body, may finally be incorporated into Isba’s cross-media measurement initiative, Origin.
You can’t have a “gold standard” measurement system for the industry that does not include the gold standard measurement system for TV, agencies have repeatedly warned during Origin’s journey from a glint in Phil Smith’s eye to the beta trials that launched a matter of weeks ago.
There is a puzzling element, however, detailed in The Media Leader’s scoop on Monday, on plans that might enable Barb’s inclusion of Origin.
And I don’t just mean the quaint description of it as a “Covent Garden protocol”.
The freedom to choose between gold and guff
Apparently, Origin will include Barb reporting as one of a range of measurement standards that advertisers or agencies can choose when evaluating their media plans.
Select here for “gold standard”, select there for “below standard”? I’m not sure that sort of “standards buffet” solution would have held water 124 years ago.
As I asked Smith during a live interview at The Future of Media last month: who exactly are these advertisers that want to see how well their ads are performing, for example, when ads are seen for less than two seconds and are only partially visible on a screen?
Smith said: “[Critics] come from a background which is about currency measurement, where historically the real creed has been apples with apples. [They] come to this with a different set of views from those that are really hell-bent on evaluation, where what they’re really looking for is richness in the data and granularity.”
Smith and Origin CEO Tom George have repeatedly argued that advertisers want the freedom to choose. This is quite a departure from a century ago, when advertisers didn’t want to choose between real newspaper ad impressions and those inflated by pulping. Remember that the motivation among advertisers globally for cross-media measurement is to stop money on online ads being wasted, be it on ad fraud or misattribution.
By insisting on a standard the industry trusts, does this mean that Barb, not Isba, is now the truly meaningful successor to the Advertisers’ Protection Society? Whereas Isba was prepared to launch Origin formally next year without Barb, Barb seems to have stuck to its guns by not allowing its data to be used in ways that would weaken it as a JIC.
Choice is important — but only if you’re sure about what to choose between. Definitions matter.
Omar Oakes is UK editor-in-chief of The Media Leader and was nominated for B2B Columnist of the Year 2024 by the British Society of Magazine Editors. 100% Media 0% Nonsense is a weekly column about the state of media and advertising.