The times they are a changin’ again and digital media better follow suit.

Gaining steam from what began last year, 2018 is shaping up to be the year of a great number of reckonings that have been a long time coming.

From finally recognizing women as actual equals to men rather than saying one thing in public and acting the opposite way in practice (e.g., women being elected at every level in record numbers – including as President of the Harvard Law Review for the first time in 130 years and the first female Police Commissioner of Scotland Yard in its 188 year history; the powerful “Women’s March” against President Trump that became the largest single-day protest in US history; an all-female Air India crew circumnavigating the globe; Patty Jenkins’ film “Wonder Woman” raking in over US$821 million at the box office and garnering universal praise from critics and fans; and much more), to exposing sexual harassment and assault in government and numerous industries with tangible accountability and public repercussions for the aggressors, to the beginnings of real conversations and what ultimately looks like gun control action in the United States despite the money and power wielded by the relentless lobbyists at the National Rifle Association (NRA).

Now, advertisers are stepping up to say they will no longer be party to what Unilever’s CMO, Keith Weed, calls the “digital swamp” of social media that is “eroding social trust, harming users and undermining democracies.”

First it was P&G and JP Morgan Chase pulling their huge budgets when ads appeared next to unknown, questionable content on social platforms like YouTube, and now Unilever, which spends 25% of their entire marketing budget with them, is threatening Google and Facebook with the same if they don’t partner with the advertisers (and hopefully the agencies) to change things – and quickly.

There are many who say that brands have never been built through digital marketing and at February’s Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) annual leadership meeting, Weed and his ilk declared that consumer trust in established brands is being rapidly eroded by the new media landscape.

For far too long – basically, the quarter century of its existence – marketers have treated the entirety of the digital environment from social to IoT to geofences and smart home assistants to basic banner ads as a greenfield for experimentation without truly understanding what gets results with proper attribution and what is a mystery.

It is refreshing and exciting to see such large organizations make declarations and put their money where those proclamations are in order to not only expose the more unseemly issues that are causing unintended damage, but to also strive to better understand what their marketing efforts are doing in terms of actual effectiveness and how to come up with better solutions and outcomes when communicating with their online audiences.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though. These changes are coming because of the people being affected. With gun control, it is the school students in jeopardy of being another mass shooting statistic who are forcing the issue that is finally bringing the NRA to its knees.

With harassment and assault, the (mostly) women are finding courage to come together and speak out, one after the other, until the powerful abusers can’t hide from the truth.

In 2017, Unilever spoke with 20,000 consumers across 5 countries and found that at least 1/3rd of them make purchasing decisions based on brands’ “social and environmental good” and the sustainability of the products they produce. The company estimated this “opportunity” at US$1.2 trillion, a figure that cannot and will not be ignored.

It’s uncertain what the next domino will be to fall, but we can be sure that it better be made of a biodegradable material if it is to gain any traction amongst the next generation of purchasers.