Save Digital Advertising, Save the World? #TogetherWeCAN #Outvertising

Where we as advertisers choose to spend our media budgets matters hugely. It matters to how effective our campaigns are, how successfully we manage to reach potential consumers, and in turn how rapidly we grow our brands. Critically though it also matters because of how it shapes the internet and the digital ecosystems around us.

The rise of fake news and misinformation may feel like a cunning new political tactic, but most of it is motivated more by chasing advertising dollars than it is by bringing around a higher democratic purpose. Ad fraud can seem like a small annoyance which wastes a percentage of our ad investments, but the reality is much of that lost money is being funnelled into organised crime or worse. The state of many websites (with their heavy ad loads, slide shows, and pop up triggers disguised as arrows) is so bleak that even South Park has made sketches about it, and of course consumer ad blocking behaviour has been accelerated along the way.

 Advertisers are far from blind to these challenges of course, and many have begun taking big steps to better ensure their adverts are appearing in quality placements, not least because their impact on consumers and ability to drive results is greatly improved by doing so. Yet even in trying to do the right thing there are traps - research by Vice has shown that keyword exclusion lists include generic terms like ‘lesbian’ or ‘muslim’ more often than terms like ‘murder’. That’s a remarkably blunt way of avoiding potentially sensitive areas of content which results instead in excluding audiences. To put that in context CHEQ (an AI based brand safety company) carried our research which suggests that as much as 73% of safe LGBT related content was unmonetisable due to the settings many brands are putting in place.

It goes a step further when advertisers also layer on website inclusion lists, carefully selected lists of sites on which you will run. Whilst a great step in theory, these inevitably focus on the biggest and most established websites and often further tighten the squeeze on smaller publishers representing diverse voices or local communities. Gay Star News, an LGBT focussed publisher, shut down this year in part because advertisers were steering clear of these ‘risky’ topic areas. Separately United for News, an organisation representing small local news titles, has shown a shocking correlation between the decline of local reporting in Brazil and the rise of corruption in those same areas. Without funding journalism cannot happen and voices will disappear, often the most vulnerable voices first.

It’s also worth taking a moment here to call out our industry’s willingness to call the bad exclusion lists ‘Black’ and the good inclusion lists ‘White’. I believe Tanya Joseph challenged it at the ISBA conference earlier this year, but we all need to be more conscious of the unwitting implications of naming conventions like these and reset our vocabulary.

I led a project specifically focussed on tightening up brand safety and improving media partner quality whilst I was at Diageo - the Trusted Marketplace tackled a lot of digital’s challenges head on and is an approach that became the foundation for the WFA Media Charter. It’s a great intention delivering hugely for the business but it’s not without its challenges. Cutting off the longer tail of programmatic inventory can inevitably push your average media prices up and undermine some of the data driven efficiency promises of digital, though it’s critical to understand why this is an upgrade in quality from what you were getting before.

 Specifically, at Diageo it became clear that brands like Smirnoff, who were running campaigns directly aimed at engaging & representing minority communities, were struggling to properly reach this audience within the model. Accordingly the last thing I did there before I left was to kick off an initiative to deliberately engage a range of more diverse media titles, bringing them into the offices to present to our marketers and ensuring they could be featured within the Trusted Marketplace approach.

It’s daunting for marketers to go on this journey when even the best intentioned can get tripped up, but none of us are alone in trying to do so, it’s important to understand some of the support which is available:

The Conscious Advertising Network is a volunteer organisation out of the UK looking to pull together many of the different initiatives in this space and to turn them into clear manifestos marketers can work towards. It is not an 'ad network' in a digital media sense. The core ask is simply to be more conscious about the issues, and for marketers to ensure questions along these lines appear in their briefs and are followed up when they ask to see how campaigns performed. We need to look beyond blank KPIs and efficiencies to understand truly where our adverts ran, who was seeing them and what kinds of content we were funding along the way.

CAN has a series of manifestos covering off the key areas of Ad Fraud, Diversity, Informed Consent, Hate Speech, Children’s Wellbeing, and Fake News. Rather than duplicating existing thinking they’ve partnered with experts in the field like JICwebs, Stop Funding Hate, Creative Equals and ISBA. Personally we’ve taken the principles and educated my team across my EMEA region on them, and in partnership with Publicis we’re developing white labelled, brand focussed, materials to make it even easier for other advertisers to do the same. The IAB UK Gold Standard is a great example of an initiative that can help deliver on those manifesto points, by accredditing and helping identify truly quality titles.

At the other end of the scale the Global Alliance for Responsible Media is a fantastic new initiative driven worldwide by the WFA and some of its core member advertisers, working in an alliance of uncommon collaboration with their agencies and many of the global media platforms themselves. These large advertisers are leveraging their scale to represent the voices of the industry and apply lobbying pressure to make real changes to how platforms function and deliver on these needs, in a way that no individual advertiser can.

It’s easy to challenge the alliance for including often criticised partners like Facebook & Google within it, but the reality is that it’s only by working together and being really clear on what the industry needs, and what is practically possible, that some of this can be solved. It’s probably helpful to think of the Conscious Advertising Network as championing the individual responsibility or brands and agencies and helping them to act now, whilst GARM is paving a longer-term future where improved tools, functionality and policies better enable that at scale.

For those willing to go beyond the basics of ‘avoiding the bad’ and really push to see how their media and marketing decisions can positively impact the culture and environment around them there is other support out there too. I mentioned United for News who are building an ad network to make it easier for brands to buy across small local news titles, Brand Advance is doing the same in the diversity space with a network of LGBT+ and minority ethnic partners.

I’m also proud to be part of an organisation called Outvertising, which champions LGBT+ representation both within the industry and in terms of what it produces. We’ve recently published a new guide which helps brands navigate the potentially tricky space of positively representing diverse communities in their advertising whilst avoiding coming across as forced or as a commercial cash-in. Combined with advice on how to avoid some of the obvious pitfalls of brand safety settings mentioned above we’re turning it into a roadshow that we’ve brought to many agencies and brands already but will continue to do so more whilst there’s a willing audience.

As I said at the start, where we invest our media matters, and we have a responsibility not just to our businesses and shareholders, but also to wider society to pay close attention to that. It can be a daunting thing to undertake and challenging to ever fully understand but that’s exactly why these organisations exist to support. For most marketers the first step is a simple conversation with your media buying & creative agencies - what are we doing already? Are we accidentally excluding people? Where are my adverts appearing and what are they funding? What more could we be doing?

Jerry Daykin is a board member of CAN, Outvertising and the WFA Media Forum, and writes here in those capacities, his day job is EMEA Media Director at GSK Consumer Healthcare.