Advertising in the digital age

In this episode of The Persuasion Game, Laura talks with Nick Manning, co-founder of Manning Gottlieb, and Caroline Marshall, former editor of Campaign, about the rapidly changing advertising landscape and discusses their pioneering ‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ initiative. This wide-ranging conversation explores the evolution of digital platforms, the impact on traditional media, and the importance of creativity in advertising.  

Advertising: Who Cares? Website for information and sign up: www.advertisingwhocares.org 

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Transcript

Adam: This is the Persuasion Game, the Forge’s podcast all about the art of persuasion. Each episode we connect with marketers, business leaders and beyond to learn how they use persuasion to influence their customers, convince their stakeholders and drive their businesses forward.

Adam: Good morning Laura.

Laura: how are you doing?

Adam: I’m doing really well thank you. How are you today?

Laura: I’m excellent thanks. I have a question for you — when was the last time you saw an ad and it prompted you to buy something, and what was it?

Adam: That’s really interesting. So the last time I bought something directly because of an advert was actually something I saw on Instagram. And you know when you’ve clicked on an ad on Instagram and then it continually sort of follows you around the internet for a bit — I think what you’re seeing there is the rise of digital advertising and the ability to kind of put something in front of someone and then almost pester them until they convert and buy that product.

Laura: Pretty much the seven-year-old’s approach to making you buy something.

Adam: Exactly — the pester power. Yeah, which I think is very different to how advertising has been previously.

Laura: Exactly. I mean it’s actually quite hard to think of the last time you saw a really iconic ad that made you think “wow, this brand is so powerful, conversations are happening around it, there’s a huge amount of cultural momentum.” And I think that’s going to be really pertinent to the conversation that I’m flying solo on today. We are going to be talking about the evolution in platforms and what that’s actually meant for advertising — for good and for frankly some areas for optimisation. So it’s going to be a bit of a call to arms as well as a reflection on some of the changes that we have to adapt to.

Adam: Well I’m looking forward to hearing the interview and catching up with you after.

Laura: Today on the Persuasion Game we’re joined by two highly respected figures in the world of marketing and media. Nick Manning, co-founder of the pioneering Manning Gottlieb, has played a key role in shaping modern media planning and strategy. And joining Nick is Caroline Marshall, the former editor of Campaign and an expert in the trends, challenges and opportunities shaping the creative industries. Together they’re here to discuss their new project Advertising Who Cares — a seminal explanation of why advertising seems to be losing its relevance, and a call to arms about what to do about it. Welcome to you both.

Nick: Well thanks for having us.

Laura: Nick, let’s just start with a quick reflection on the state of the industry today. It’s absolutely enormous isn’t it.

Nick: Well for the first time last year it became a trillion dollar industry, which is a real milestone. And it’s grown dramatically over the last few years. What’s been driving that growth largely is the direct-to-consumer market, e-commerce, social, search, things like retail media networks — Amazon growing massively, other people entering the market so Walmart, even Uber, some of the financial companies like Chase. So there are a lot of new advertisers, and advertising has become their lifeblood. If you’re a direct-to-consumer brand it’s what you use to build your brand and it’s what you use to sell your product.

Laura : We were reflecting on how instinctive that relationship is now between the nudge and the purchase with so many of those channels. You know, it used to be sort of you’d reflect on something and maybe think about it, go to a store. And now it’s like “oops, I’ve actually bought three things I saw on Instagram the other day.”

Nick: Well yeah, immediacy has become a major factor in all of this, and there’s been a big trend towards trying to drive an immediate sale. Whereas obviously in prior times it was about planting brand seeds and waiting for them to grow. Now it’s very much led by more short-term considerations. But it’s brought a whole new generation of advertisers into the advertising market — many of them small to medium-sized businesses. Just to put that into context, Facebook have got well over 10 million advertising customers, including the big brands, but we’ve got an enormous long tail of some mum and pop businesses. Some smaller brands and businesses have been built entirely on social and search. So in some ways the advertising market has divided between the more traditional brand-led side of life, and the new brands and businesses that have been built by online channels.

Laura: That’s interesting because that’s often the defence that these platforms will use when they feel like they’re under attack — “we have so many businesses that rely on us as the main channel, we support small businesses, things will collapse without us.” You’ve described it in the past as creating a more diverse and less homogeneous landscape, and that affects big brands too doesn’t it?

Nick: Well brands have had to go into the new channels to probably a disproportionate extent because that’s where they see the public has gone. And I mean the average dwell time on TikTok these days is an hour a day. And people — especially at the younger end — are on their devices all day every day, flicking between different apps and other platforms. And that’s part of the problem — because the audience has become extremely elusive. They don’t dwell for long at any given moment in time. So the actual usage might be an hour a day but the average session might be only a few seconds up to a minute. So trying to catch audiences in that environment is very hard. That’s why the attention industry has grown up — because it is now trying to arrest attention.

The Ofcom report from last year looked at where people are getting their news from now, and it’s roughly split 50/50 between online platforms and more mainstream platforms. We’ve passed a stage now where people are tending to get more of their news from online sources than from the more traditional sources, which is quite a milestone.

Laura: And that’s only going to be exacerbated with the news that there won’t be checks and regulations on information

Nick: It can reinforce prejudices and all sorts of other things. So it’s important to have news sources which are analytical, fact-based and believe in the truth. And unfortunately those are the ones which are on the run at the moment. Elon Musk himself said the MSM — mainstream media — is all propaganda, and he really believes it. He believes that the only truth lies with the people, vox populi, he says. And the problem there is that people don’t necessarily trust online channels either. The Ofcom report said 50% of people are getting their news from online channels but the level of trust in that was far lower than it is for the more established channels — admittedly in the UK. We have to be careful here because the US is another world, and it really is another world. They don’t have public service broadcasting and some of the TV channels like Fox News make no bones about what their point of view is.

Laura: Just going back to that point about attention, Caroline — I mean you presided over Campaign in kind of a golden age of brands really setting the culture. I certainly remember Levi’s, for example, being one brand where you thought “wow, if that ad comes out the song’s going to be number one, everyone’s going to be wearing the jeans, the star of it is going to be famous.” Tell us a little bit about that cultural impact piece and how you’ve seen it shifting.

Caroline: Well I think things have changed enormously as you said. I don’t mean to suggest that everything was great once and not so good now, but I think one of the things that’s happened to us as human beings is that the time we’re prepared to spend on anything — on advertising as one of those things but on pretty much any activity that requires our cognitive faculties — is less, because we’re bombarded with so much stuff. So all analysis around advertising points to the ever more important role of grabbing attention. I think the work of Tom Roach has found that we have on average two and a half seconds to grab people’s attention — very short. And this of course points to the really important role of storytelling and emotion and all those softer aspects of grabbing attention. And the reality is that a lot of new advertising these days doesn’t really rely on that too much — it relies on bombarding us with short and less memorable messages.

Laura: Yeah — hard to tell a story in two and a half seconds.

Caroline: It is. It’s possible but it’s tough.

Nick: Gary Vaynerchuk said last year that the creative brief should say “you need to make the impact you’re planning to make in the first two seconds of any communication, because that’s all you’re going to get.” And you’re thinking — it took me more than two seconds to read that.

Laura: A bit quicker Gary, yeah!

Nick: But yeah, it’s crazy — basically saying the creative brief should now be written for a two-second execution, which is clearly ludicrous.

Laura: Obviously there’s going to be some impacts for the ad industry. I suppose if you’re a former brand person, it could be tempting to go “well isn’t that an ad agency problem? That’s the new environment that you’ve got to work with.” But I think the point that you’re making with Advertising, Who Cares is this is a massive brand problem as well — this is a shared problem for brand owners too. What do you think some of the key tensions are that are emerging from this new landscape?

Nick: Well Advertising, Who Cares is about all sorts of things, but the main thing is about addressing the imbalance in the marketing and advertising industry which used to be led by advertisers — and everybody else basically worked in the interest of advertisers. It was a demand-led industry. What’s happened over time is it’s now become a supply-led industry, largely through the dominance of the big digital channels. They pretty much hold all the cards now. And as a result, everybody’s kind of had to fall in line behind that. People say, “well the big channels are attracting the attention the attention of the consumer now”. But more broadly speaking what’s happened is we’ve gone from being led by creativity as it were, before, to being led by media, execution.  

So there are two imbalances here. There’s a shift from the clients towards the supply side, and towards media channels having primacy over the creative messaging. So we’re trying to get some more balance back in the system.

Laura: One of the things that really stood out to me in Advertising Who Cares was you talked about the shine coming off advertising, and I thought that was such a lovely way of illuminating it. Because it’s not that it’s not still robust, it’s not that it’s not still really important — but that spark of inspiration feels like it’s not there. And what we were reflecting on was private label and the growth of private label, which has been a massive conversation with so many of the clients we work with. I guess the question a lot of people would be asking is “why should we buy this brand?” And it feels like that lovely lever of something really aspirational and exciting has perhaps lost a bit of its lustre. Do you think that’s fair Caroline?

Caroline: Certainly for some brands that’s true. But I think I believe in the truth of a statement that Jeremy Bullmore — the great advertising philosopher — once wrote, which is about how people build brands. And he talks very brilliantly about people building brands like a bird builds a nest, from straws and scraps — say that quickly — that they come across in their life, in their working life, in their domestic life, all over the place. And that they build these things slowly and deliberately over time. And that I suppose will never change. That’s a truth about brands that allows them to be both valuable in a boardroom and valuable in somebody’s life — as something they can rely on and trust. Without wanting to overstate the value of lollies and cheese in our lives — but yeah.

Laura: No it’s interesting, isn’t it. If you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer, often what you see is that businesses are actually indexing better than governments or other institutions in terms of trust. And perhaps there’s a certain sense of “well you have to do that or I won’t buy you” — so there’s a little bit of a hygiene factor.

Nick: Well it’s also the aspect of justifying a premium. Because obviously branded goods are considerably more expensive than own label. And the way to justify that premium — because on a parity basis they probably perform the same — is to be a well-known brand. This has been going on for decades, there’s nothing new about all this. But there’s been a shift really towards away from building brands, towards a more immediate sell. And it’s kind of exemplified by the Silicon Valley view of the world, which is “it’s all about eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs.” Whereas we would think in terms more of — yes, your ads need to be seen and heard, but you need to drive engagement, you need to embed messages in the memory.

Laura: Braincells.

Nick: And it’s helpful if you appeal to the heart as well as the head, because that’s the way that brands get built long term.

But the whole industry has moved to a short-term basis — it’s all about getting your brand or your product in front of the audience in the most efficient manner possible. Not necessarily effective at all. So there’s been a massive shift, and we’ve now got an industry divided into two between the more brand-led side and the side that’s just trying to get a quick fix.

And the American approach to advertising has always been a bit more along those lines. If you ever watched any American television going back decades — you’d have the credits for the programme, then the ads would roll, then you’d have about three minutes of content, and the ads would roll. They’ve always been about trying to capture the audience almost unawares. Whereas we worked in a much more curated environment where there was a better relationship between the surrounding editorial and advertising.

Laura: Yeah, that kind of pay-to-play almost — from the audience — rather than actually trying to engage them and tell a story that brings them in. It’s very much a push narrative.

Nick: Their approach has always been much more “let’s interrupt the consumer.” I saw a presentation from Google in December at a conference and they said “we’ve got this fabulous new product where you can watch the action on the football field on the left side of the screen and there are ads running on the right.”

Laura: And you can call your therapist about a nervous breakdown at the same time!

Nick: “And just before the guy scores a touchdown, we can change to an ad on thr right!” And I’m exaggerating for effect here, but it is just a fact of life — the British approach, and not just British but European and throughout the rest of the world, has been a bit more balanced.

If you go back to public service broadcasting and even ITV, they’re all regulated to control the amount of advertising you can have. And that was how things worked for a long time — to protect the public from excessive advertising. And we’ve lost all of that. People are no longer protected from excessive advertising, in fact they’re subjected to it.

Laura: I’m old enough to remember the relationship between the kettle going on and the ad breaks in Coronation Street.

Nick: You know, if you’re writing an episode of Coronation Street you would build into your thinking the fact that there’s going to be a commercial break. So you would build to a plot line or something just before the ad break to keep people in anticipation of what’s going to happen later. Whereas in the US it’s kind of “no, we’re just going to insert an ad here.” So if you watch YouTube — which we all do — ads pop up all over the place. I was watching a podcast and it was Richard Osman and Marina Hyde talking, and Richard Osman was just halfway through a sentence and literally this ad popped up for God knows what. And there was no attempt to put it into an ad break — it just appeared suddenly.

Laura: Very interesting point you’re making. Because I was listening to what I think was the same podcast, and they were talking about the storytelling of people like Russell T Davies, who started on Coronation Street. And as you say, that storytelling was about respecting a narrative structure that also included an ad break. So everyone has become more individualised and “I’ve got to speak,” and there’s a loss of flow for the actual audience.

But we’re here today to talk about the counter movement to that, which is Advertising Who Cares. Should we start Nick, perhaps, with a little bit of an intro as to what it’s actually all about?

Nick: Yes. It’s about a number of things but the main thing we’re trying to do is to help advertisers primarily advertise better and more effectively, and also to help create a better advertising industry for the people who work in it. And we’ve got a number of strands to do that.

So we break it down really into things that would make advertising better — such as getting back to some great creativity, great creative ideas. What does great creative look like? How does it tell the stories that we want to tell? How does it engage people in a way that is going to be really effective? And how what goes into that.

But in today’s context we’re not trying to turn back the clock and say suddenly we should all put our money back in ITV. All of this takes into account where we are today, what’s going on around us. So it’s designed for today and tomorrow, not retrospectively.

We also look at how those messages get delivered to people in the most effective way possible, and effectiveness clearly should be at the front and centre of that. But we also believe in some slightly more basic things — which is that we want to get back to a situation where advertising money funds high quality media content. Not just news — there’s been a lot of discussion about that — but it’s not just about news. It’s about great comedy, great entertainment, great documentaries. It’s all about the ecosystem of the media industry. And the sad fact is that the people who spend the most money on good content have been deprived of advertising revenue as it has flowed to the platforms who do not make any content at all.

70% of the growth in the industry over the last ten years, according to WARC, has gone to Alphabet properties — so essentially Google — the Meta properties — so obviously Facebook and Instagram — and Amazon. And none of those companies make anything. They take content from the public and represent it back for advertising. And as a result the companies who struggle most are the ones who are being underfunded — the ones who are investing in high quality drama, for example and we moved away from that and we’re trying to get a better balance back.

So going back to what you were saying earlier about balancing — the industry has shifted too much towards the sell side, too much money has gone into the platforms that don’t provide a great environment for advertising. Not to mention the fact that 50% of all web traffic is artificial. So clients don’t even know half the time.

Laura: 50%!

Nick: Yeah, 50%of web traffic bought by advertisers may not even be real. We say things like that because we want people to sit up and pay attention. Because it is true and always has been — we’ve had massive issues of artificial traffic, ad fraud, advertising not being seen by people. All of these things have been talked about for a long time but they haven’t broken through the consciousness of advertisers.

Caroline: These sound like huge problems as you describe them. I almost feel like packing up and going home. But the thing about any big change or big problem is that tension between the personal and the collective, isn’t it? What can we as individuals in our industry do? The problem is so big that I as an individual, my company or my sector, may find it almost impossible to deal with.

So I think the thing about Advertising Who Cares was you and your co-founder Brian Jacobs standing up and saying “yes, the problem is big, but we all have to stand up and do something about it.” And that was — for me — I remember reading the story of you and Brian putting it together and launching it when it appeared in the trade press. And the first thing I did was write an email to Nick, who I’d known as a journalist on Campaign, and the subject line was “I am Spartacus.” It was my moment of standing up and saying “whatever skills I’ve got, I really want to help you do this.”

Laura: And you put a lot of energy into the launch last year right Caroline?

Caroline: We did, yes. It launched as an event on September the 12th last year at London’s Royal Society of Arts. Through zero advertising budget but loads of PR and loads of shoe leather on behalf of everybody involved, we got roughly 200 people to pay enough money to cover the costs for the venue for the day, to come and hear some 12 to 15 speakers talk around five strands which Nick and Brian identified as the five areas around which all the thinking would coalesce.

Laura: And who were the type of people joining you at that session?

Caroline: It was a real combination of people. My sense in the room on the day was “I’m going to go and have a look at these people — are you a threat to my business or are you an opportunity?” And it was an interesting, very optimistic mood in the room, but I felt that people were really checking us out on that day. At that time I think we had a supporter base of some 250 to 300 people. By the time of the launch it’s now heading for 600, so you can draw your own conclusions from that.

Laura: Yeah, fabulous.

Caroline: If anything the room was people who do remember how things used to be — it was heavily skewed towards those kinds of people, which of course it would be. So our challenge going forwards is definitely to reach a younger generation of people and the future leaders of our industry. So that they have a sense of how good and exciting a place the industry could be to work in, and how wonderfully effective advertising could be, and how journalism could be funded in a more fair and helpful way to society.

Laura: And I think one of the points that you land really well in Advertising Who Cares is it’s actually a brand person’s job to be as involved in this conversation. There are a lot of conversations about being a responsible brand, being a brand that people can trust, being a sustainable brand. Can you talk a little bit about how this current environment is perhaps not helping brands deliver that?

Nick: It’s partly aimed at the advertisers because they need to be armed with the best possible guidance as to how to advertise well — by that we mean advertise effectively but also in a responsible way. And responsibility covers many bases, right down to sustainability and so on. But it’s also making sure that your advertising money that you invest is going to the right places and is doing the right job.
Going back to your point about crowdsourcing — because in the end this is a big crowdsourcing exercise. When we first put our first blog out we had no idea whether we would be supported by people or not, and we found to our pleasure and delight that they did. So we’re now going out on a big crowdsourcing exercise to find the best thinking on all aspects of advertising in the advertising industry. We’re going to be actively talking to people — approaching the people who are doing great work in all these areas, including people like the Cannes and the Effies, Binet and Field — all these people are doing great work. And a lot of that great thinking and work is in silos and is not understood and appreciated by the advertiser community in particular. Despite the best efforts of the trade associations, who do what they do and do it well, but it is not in one place.

What we’re going to be doing is providing a central source of all of the best thinking across nine different areas of the advertising industry that we believe need to be reshaped and brought to the attention of advertisers. It’s a grassroots movement trying to influence what goes on within the advertising industry, and we’re doing it on a purely voluntary basis — everybody is donating their time free of charge. We also take no sponsorship, because as soon as you do that you start to introduce an element of commerciality which we can’t have. So we are trying to get the wisdom of the crowds to advise people on what the best of advertising can look like, and in that way we get a better balance back into the industry, we hope, and in that we have the support of the advertising associations, and the others have said “good on you guys, we are very much behind it!”  

Laura: I love the idea of being crowd-powered but can’t be bought. It feels really powerful doesn’t it.

Nick: And everybody who’s doing it may at the back of their mind think “oh, I wonder if there’s anything in this for me.” But actually everybody’s doing it because they think it’s the right thing to do. Who wants worse advertising, and who wants a worse advertising industry? So everybody believes that things can be improved on both dimensions. We’ve had, as Caroline was saying, up to about 600 official supporters — and that’s all been incoming and organic. Now we’re actually actively going to the marketplace and inviting people to join.

Laura: One thing that’s really stood out is it feels like it’s bringing a bit of love and pride back to the industry, which is so welcome — not just “you’re doing this wrong” but actually how can we inspire and galvanise and share inspiration from an increasingly siloed world.

There are nine areas — we are a short podcast so I wanted to just focus on two that I think our audience will find particularly interesting. Caroline, can you talk to me a little bit about the creativity strand of this initiative?

Caroline: Yes absolutely — that’s the one that I will be heading and assembling a crack team of advertising thinkers and doers to work on, which is really exciting. One thing that one of our speakers spoke about in September really struck me when it came to everything underpinning this strand, and it was Michael Farmer — a Madison Avenue-based business consultant. One of the slightly horrifying stats he brought to bear was that in 2010 an average creative team was perhaps working on roughly 110 deliverable bills per year. And by 2019 it was well over 300. That’s a huge difference isn’t it. And therefore quality isn’t going to be the same —

Laura: People are pouring from an empty cup probably.

Caroline: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I suppose what the big goal for us is, is to put in one place really thoughtful thinking — whether that constitutes podcasts, writing, speeches, examples of work, case studies — that constitutes good, original and effective creative thinking for today’s environment. A place where we can learn about the best in planning, the best in insight, the best in strategy, and also in brief generation as well. Our trade bodies and industry bodies — Nick’s right, they have been banging the drum for some time about all of these issues. But the jigsaw isn’t really complete in any one place. So we are hoping to assemble that jigsaw and move it towards completion in terms of a resource that people can access for free. Most training isn’t free in our industry

Nick: So it’s also worth saying that. There’s a lot of good work going on in the world of creativity, in media, in people-related matters and others, but they tend to talk to their own community. So the creative stuff that’s been coming out — like last year about consistency out of the IPA Advertising Effectiveness paper — all those kinds of things get noticed most by the creative side of the industry, but not by advertisers and not by other people. So the point Caroline’s making about the jigsaw is very important

Laura: Yes.

Nick: all of these things are interrelated, they all stem from a number of different business models, but you have to put the whole picture together to understand it. And most advertisers don’t have the time to look at that for themselves, so we’re trying to do it for them.

The other aspect that’s changed is that we used to have campaigns, and we’d spend weeks thinking about the campaign and you’d build up to it — you’d have time to think and time to plan. Now because advertisers need to be always on, they’re managing their social channels and their digital channels day in day out with endless permutations of content and channel and data. There’s no time to think anymore because it’s constant plate spinning with no run-up to it. You might be developing campaigns at the same time but you’ve got to keep the thing going. So nobody has any time anymore. And they’re all stretched. And the same’s true for agencies as well — the one thing we hear consistently from clients is “my advertising agency don’t seem to be able to manage the workloads.” Part of that has to do with how they’re paid but it’s just day in day out and it’s relentless. So the thinking time, the planning time, is reduced.

Laura: So that actually leads quite nicely Nick into the point that you were making about another strand of work, which is really about the motivation of people in the advertising industry. I think it’s a truth that everyone’s acknowledging that young people are not finding this an aspirational career anymore. Can we speak a bit about that?

Nick: What we’re trying to do is say how can we provide employment and enjoyment — because in the end people want to come into work, they want to do great work. Nobody comes in thinking “I’m going to do a really bad job today.” We want people to want to work in advertising and want to contribute to the future of advertising.

At our launch event that Caroline talked about, we had a presentation from Christine Reed who’d done a lot of research into young people’s attitudes towards advertising and the advertising industry, and we had quotes like “why would I want to join an industry that bombards us with cr*p all day long.” We also have a problem with low motivation within the workforce. We have issues of mental health and other things as well. Salaries have stagnated in the last 17 years. So we want to create an environment where advertising becomes again an attractive industry — for the people who are in it now but also for the people to come. That’s a big job, because we’re starting from not a great position really. But we need to do it because otherwise the brain drain will continue and we won’t attract the people that we need, whether they’re school leavers or graduates or whatever.

But there’s one other aspect which I’m going to cheat here by telling you about — another work stream, which is industry relationships. We want to foster a much greater sense of collegiality and collaboration between the different entities within the advertising industry. That used to be the case because everybody was working on behalf of the same end user — the advertiser. We’ve lost that as well. So we want to get back to a situation where everybody’s pulling in the same direction as much as they can within commercial constraints, and trying to do the best job they can to make advertising more effective for the people who need it to be effective, and obviously to make a better industry for people as well.
So these are all big hairy audacious goals, but we think they’re absolutely in need of being addressed. And once we’ve done all of this we will make the outputs available to everybody free on a website and in podcasts and in presentations. And I can see this working quite well within the academic environment — where we go into schools and colleges and universities and do a presentation and say “when you’re considering careers, these are the reasons why you should consider advertising.” We then need that to be followed up with real action by the people who employ people.

But when people say “what does your end goal look like?” — the end goal really is that we have a much healthier, happier industry producing much more effective work. And the way to do that is to arm people with the information they need to help that come about.

Laura: Fabulous. And what would you like to see from a person working in a brand today in terms of supporting you in next steps?

Caroline: I guess for me it would be really insisting that we all need to develop a focus on how something works, not just that it does. As simple as that really. Because that leads us to all sorts of debates beyond the product itself — but all the surrounding category context, culture setting, user media — all that really interesting stuff. It’s not enough just to say that something works, you need to really understand and dig down under the bonnet.

Laura: That feels very deep and holistic. And as you say, more balanced, more of an ecosystem rather than lots of individual strands.

Nick: Yes, that’s exactly what we need to do. And we start really by explaining why the world works the way it does. So our business model strand says let’s talk about the world as it is now and will be, as opposed to the world we’d like it to be. So everything that we’re doing is within the context of where we are. We’re not going to suddenly turn back to an era when the platforms weren’t very powerful. How do we address it? How do we arm advertisers in particular with the tools they need?

You know, what we want is for someone to be able to go onto our resources and say — “when I’m thinking about creativity, how should I be thinking about it? How about comms planning? How about trade and trust and transparency? How about measurement and accountability?” So they will be able to go into our resources and say “this is good advice.” Then who they choose to execute against that is entirely up to them — not us. But we’re going to provide them with the tools of the job.

Adam: That’s fantastic. And where can people find out more about Advertising Who Cares?

Nick: Well initially the place to go is www.advertisingwho cares.org, where you can find out all about this, you can read the manifestos, you can see what we’re doing and you can sign up to become a supporter. And we’re talking about things like giving supporters first dibs on the conference and so on. But yes, that’s the place to start.

And really the other thing that people should do if they’re interested is go and watch the videos of our launch event — particularly Lucy Jameson from Uncommon about creativity, Jenny Barnett on trading, trust and transparency, Michael Farmer on business models and so on and so forth.

Laura: We will make sure we put links to those in the show notes. Nick and Caroline, thank you so much.

Nick & Caroline: Thank you very much.

Laura: Wow, well what did you think?

Adam: Well I love listening to that — that was so interesting. I’ve been following the Advertising Association and various others on the blogger sphere for a while talking about these issues, but Nick has managed to kind of pull them together in one campaign which sounds like it’s gaining some serious momentum. A really robust campaign as well.

Laura: It’s interesting — we were reflecting weren’t we that when you looked at the recent US inauguration, you know the seating plan tells you a lot. Front row seats for all of the tech giants. And that just confirms that this reality of a consolidation of power into these platforms is just not going to change.

Adam: Exactly. And all of the brands that we work with, that our listeners work with — they have a role to play in all of this. The decisions that they’re making are contributing to this reality. And I think it’s really important that we are conscious of these different power dynamics and how things are changing, and how you manage them and still build an effective and responsible brand.

Laura: Absolutely. See you next week.

Adam: See you next week.

Adam: Thanks for listening. If you’d love to hear more from marketers, entrepreneurs and business leaders about how to use the art of persuasion to drive your business forward, then make sure you’re following the podcast in your favourite podcast app. And just one last ask from us — this is a new podcast and we’d love it if you could be persuaded to help us spread the word by telling somebody else about it, leaving us a review, or even better sharing an episode on social media. Search The Forge on LinkedIn