Time to find out who cares in this industry
Opinion
We must work together to build a sustainable future for the industry that nurtures trust and transparency. Being part of the Who Cares? initiative is one way.
Not much of a “silly season” this year, so I was grateful for the entertainment from Omnicom’s magnificently corporate announcement of the reconfiguration of its creative assets — sorry, agencies.
A full autumn now awaits, with everyone toiling to meet Q4 targets and make bosses wealthier.
And what promises to be a milestone event is almost upon us. Brian Jacobs and Nick Manning’s Who Cares? initiative has been gathering momentum since its soft launch.
It seeks to challenge how advertising has got itself into a bind and how it might extract itself and save its skin.
The next step is an event on 12 September.
Solution-focused
The initiative has five key workstreams — themselves a comment on how much the industry has changed, mainly not for the better, in less than a generation. They are: business models; trading, transparency and trust; measurement and accountability; recruitment and wellbeing; and brands and journalism.
Wisely, it’s solution-focused, not problem-focused, and the breadth of its canvass avoids dwelling only on the worst.
The organisers report that the considerable interest includes many from holding companies, but mostly anonymous. They observe wryly how leery these employees are about being seen to support any discussion of things that could be improved despite the obvious and universal benefits.
Estimates vary but, whichever one you choose, vast amounts of advertiser money are being spent on black holes, be they “real” media events with questionable audiences or artificial media events with no human audience whatsoever. Trust? Transparency?
Some two-thirds of global adspend now goes this way, while other media continue to provide better, safer, more verifiable, liked, entertaining and engaging channels.
Good research feeds trust
Talking of which, let’s hear it for the excellent Matt Hill, who is leaving the industry’s best trade marketing body, Thinkbox, to join its shareholder Sky. There, he will have unbridled access to Sky’s 4m-strong cross-platform audience research panel. Expect lots of great, quantified, substantiated stuff about telly and beyond soon.
Meanwhile, CFlight and Barb are increasingly producing the kind of work the wealthy online platforms should provide but instead tend to avoid like the plague. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; a lot, fatal — apparently.
Isba’s Project Origin is some way past its promised late-spring dénouement and not much news has reached me. Whether this signals more serious problems for this global measurement project from the World Federation of Advertisers is not clear. There is a persistent and understandable schism with broadcasters based on the definition of a view. But we must remain hopeful.
All these initiatives can feed into restoring accountability, confidence and trust.
That said, I sense a need for great caution towards the recent surge of enthusiasm for “synthetic data”. Granted, the cost — and sheer practicality — of researching real people’s views and behaviours is ever rising, so any clever substitute or enhancement is attractive.
But, so far, nobody has convinced me that it offers greater accuracy, only exactitude — which is not the same. We might be more confident about the data and its interpretation, but not of its fundamental veracity. We could well be ever more precisely wrong. For now, a work in progress at best.
Brand safety remains key issue
To safety — our umbrella trade body the Advertising Association is rather quiet. Perhaps not surprising, as it also embodies and takes good money from the platforms. But things like The Times‘ interesting piece on the Houthis’ use of X to trade arms demand response.
With advertisers scaling back their investments from unsafe spaces, X’s owner decided to sue the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM, of which X was a member) and several advertisers for allegedly co-ordinating an anti-competitive boycott. This has led to the premature closure of GARM.
It remains to be seen whether Elon Musk can sue customers into patronising X. If the lawsuit reaches trial and is successful — extremely unlikely, I know — it will rewrite the basic rules of commerce and do nothing for trust or brand safety.
Perhaps it’s small beer to someone whose rockets are now an indispensable part of the leading first-world nation’s space programme and whose internet communications are vital in several critical strife-torn regions of the world.
Yet many governments are now rounding on social platforms in light of further evidence of the harm they can foment. There were serious riots in major cities and towns in the UK, instigated by misinformation on social platforms.
For me, the saddest of the five Who Cares? workstreams is the one about advertising no longer being an excellent career choice. But there’s no better way to rebuild this than through addressing the things that eroded it — business models, transparency, trust, journalistic and creator integrity, verification and accountability.
Bring it on.
Bob Wootton spent 40 years working in advertising, first as a media buyer at some of the UK’s leading agencies before joining the trade body ISBA in 1996, where he was advertising and media director for 20 years. He is also the founder of Deconstruction, a media and tech consulting business, and presents The Guitar Show on YouTube.