Advertising: Who Cares? Now What?

10 October 2024

About a month ago (September 12^th) we launched the Advertising: Who Cares? movement with a 4-hour long event at London’s Royal Society of Arts. We had an exceptional speaker line up; we sold every seat; we paid no-one and spent nothing. We took no sponsorship money. We raised money for NABS, the advertising industry charity.

This all demonstrates a few things to me. Not least on the importance of encouraging free debate and discussion, something that rarely happens at sponsored conferences where speaker selection and sponsors are intertwined – but that’s for another post.

People do indeed care. As I’m writing this we have close to 450 supporters, worldwide.

Why do they care? Because we are in a mess and they feel that something has to be done. Lucy Jameson’s outstanding keynote played an ad for OVO Energy featuring the famous line from Howard Beale’s speech in ‘Network’: ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!’

Whose fault is it? This seems to me irrelevant. I have my views, others will have theirs but again to quote from Lucy (Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman in ‘Death of a Salesman’ this time): ‘I’m not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that kind because the woods are burning, you understand? There’s a big blaze going on all around’.

The question is what to do about it.

There were notable absences from our RSA launch event. We didn’t invite anyone, we just put the event out there and people bought tickets or they didn’t.

Amongst those who didn’t were the platforms. Or the streaming services. Or some of the largest holding companies (one or two did buy tickets, plus there are individuals from these organisations on our supporter list, but anonymously). There were few media owners.

There were advertisers, trade bodies, research businesses, consultants, independent creative and media agencies.

There are understandable reasons why those that didn’t come chose not to come.

One was: we can’t afford to upset A, or B, or C.

But why not? If the aim is to improve the industry, isn’t that a good thing? As I said in an earlier post who wouldn’t want the industry’s myriad problems addressed?

What we do next has to involve the biggest players. We know we’ve been noticed. Our supporter group grows every day and we see the names of the people joining whilst respecting their desire to keep their involvement quiet.

We know that some are following a policy of ‘ignore them, the whole thing will blow over’.

We don’t think it will. After all, revolutions start on the streets, not in the institutions.

The Who Cares? idea has generated some interest outside our bubble. It’s always revealing to speak to those not closely involved.

When I explain the extent of ad fraud; the threat to independent journalism posed by the online social media platforms; and the fact that we are increasingly funding the spread of misinformation there is general disbelief.

Furthermore, even casual observers agree that the ads themselves are just not terribly good.

Of course, there are exceptions but overall, the standard in creativity reflects the fact that these days advertisers are more focussed on audience numbers than on the messages they put in front of those audiences.

Numbers are an easy sell; even if the numbers quoted are nearly always misleading and unvalidated. Creative judgement is hard. Numbers are quantifiable; creative opinion is ‘pink and fluffy’.

We have agencies (most particularly within the holding companies) looking for non-transparent ways of making a margin to fund their underperforming siblings, and then denying they’re doing anything remotely dubious. And at the same time complaining about a lack of trust in the industry, as if they had nothing at all to do with that state of affairs.

We have adtech businesses overcomplicating and overclaiming what they do in order to convince investors of all shapes and sizes (most with little in-depth understanding of how our industry works) that they and they alone hold the keys to the kingdom.

And we have so many people invested in the status quo that they’ve lost sight of the key benefits that lie in powerful brands created at least in part by famous advertising.

If you step back, outside the bubble this is all truly crazy.

Think about it. We have ‘trusted advisors’ who aren’t trusted, spending budgets to benefit themselves first and their clients second, using tech companies to justify their actions via often ill-defined data not validated by anyone.

Nick Manning and I started Advertising: Who Cares? to shine a light, to start a dialogue. It’s up to others how they run their businesses, of course, but we think they should make decisions based on the full knowledge of the consequences of their actions.

This is impossible if we aren’t honest, open and transparent. It seems a lot of people agree with us.

So, now what?

We have with input from many supporters generated masses of ideas, and we are keen to work with like-minded organisations and individuals to help us develop and promote our approach.

We will be contacting our supporter group with ideas to consider shortly. If you haven’t yet joined (for free at www.advertisingwhocares.org) now would be a very good time to do so, to ensure you have your say in how we should go about refocusing the ad industry.