EPISODE 1 - SERIES TRAILER - TRANSCRIPT
Host Sonoo Singh - Founder, The Creative Salon
Jake Dubbins, Co-Founder of The Conscious Advertising Network & Founder of Media Bounty.
Harriet Kingaby, Co-Founder of The Conscious Advertising Network & Mozilla Fellow
Sonoo: The Conscious Advertising Network is the first pilot edition introducing future series of thought-provoking sessions. My name is Sonoo Singh Consulting Editor of the Drum and today I would like to introduce you to the founders of CAN, Harriet Kingaby and Jake Dubbins, and discover more about the network when and why they set it up as growing importance and relevance.
Today I'm also going to be sharing some of the key topics of the podcast series that will cover between now and the end of the year. Hello Harriet and Jake, how are you both?
Jake & Harriet: Great.
Jake: Yeah. All right, good. Great to be here
Sonoo: Jake, can you first of all tell us a bit about the Conscious Advertising Network, what was it that motivated you to start it, and why does it continue to be so very important to you and Harriet today?
Jake: So what motivated me to start it is actually in 2017, I was living in East London, I loved living in East London, I was a very relentless optimist and I was in a naive space of thinking that East London was a wonderful place to live, and my, my neighbour who lived opposite me, then got very badly beaten up in a local pub, along with the landlord by a racist gang and threatened that if they ever saw him there again they do worse, and he was is the reason for that was that was because he was Turkish.
So I started looking into how I might work or volunteer to confront hate and that sort of racism, and then I went with a met Harriet at a conference that she was running which was about ethics and AI, and the lack of ethics in AI. We got together, we chatted a lot about ethics or lack of ethics in the sort of advertising space in which we worked under sort of creeping in, its massive influence in in in in our sort of information, and the narratives with which we live.
And so, and that's what sort of started the Conscious Advertising Network. And I think since then, you know, three years later, we are seeing a march of nationalism, and, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia disinformation 5g conspiracy theories about coronavirus climate misinformation and, we feel passionately and strongly that it has never been more relevant and we're at a time of infection. Now is the time, we together need to stand up and confront these things
Sonoo: Well indeed an amazing story that prompted you to set this up with Harriet and you've also obviously stated you know all the things, and the issues that we are having to deal with at the moment. Harriet can I ask because obviously like any organisation you need focus. So, what you two ended up was creating these key manifestos for the areas, causing you and indeed the industry was concerned. Can you share those with us?
Harriet: Yeah, absolutely. So, we've got six manifestos which were written by experts already doing something within the within the industry. They cover everything from Ad fraud and diversity & inclusion, informed consent, hate speech & misinformation and children's wellbeing. At the time we very much felt that conversations about issues in advertising focused on brand safety and focused on things like fraud and viewability. The issues that we were seeing were broader than that and the communities that these things were impacting were huge. So, for example advertising has a is funding, a large amounts of hate speech and fake news completely inadvertently, but that's having massive impacts on communities from travellers right through to religious groups.
We felt that we needed to broaden the conversation, really, hugely, take it away from just being about brand safety to actually being about human safety, and also start to create more holistic discussions because only with more holistic discussions, you've got effective communities at the table, can you start to create kind of better solutions. So those manifestos were created by people like Creative Equals for Diversity and Inclusion. There was a conglomerate of hate anti hate charities that worked on the Hate Speech Manifesto. We have pulled in all sorts of initiatives that were already happening so the idea is very much with our manifestos is that we're not reinventing the wheel. There's lots of diversity initiatives going on we want to signpost to the ones that are effective. For example, and where there was a gap where there was a gap in understanding between the industry, or where other institutions had created solutions that we felt were really strong, we'd also signpost to those so for example, we signpost to the work that the UN has done around defining hate speech, and also how you guidance around how you eradicate hate speech, but also maintain free speech. That’s very important as well so essentially, they're six roadmaps that organisations could take and take and embed them within their procurement process to change the default, to change the way that advertising is bought and sold.
Sonoo: So what I'm curious about Jake is especially because of the unique times that we're living in, I just wonder since between 2017 and now how easy or indeed how challenging has it been for you to go to agencies and advertisers to sign up to CAN? Especially with something like black lives matter, there has been a sharp focus on both ethics of purpose. Do you think people are talking more and acting less especially when we are hearing stories about how budgets are being slashed you've got the likes of O2 and Accenture having signed up to CAN already? Have you got more or is it is it much more frustrating than it was when he first started?
Jake: I think it's less frustrating than it was, to Harriet's point back in 2017 people were mainly talking about more commercial aspects of advertising fraud. You know that question of what is that fraud? Where does it go and what is it paid for? It wasn't being asked but I think that with societal issues that we have now with black lives matter with, with COVID as Lord Putnam put it in the report from the House of Lords a ‘Pandemic of Misinformation’, that conversation about advertising responsibility now has been mainstreamed. When we were at marketing conferences a couple of years ago, the conversation wasn't about hate speech and fake news. It is now the advertising associations conference the lead conference this year they talk much more about responsible advertising, and the ISBA conference the same.
So I think that we were a group of people back then, nobody really knew who we were, but we've really tried to bring together three brands agencies and civil society to try and answer these questions for the long term. That has meant that big agencies, big brands we had one of the biggest banks in the world. Recently we've had all six of the big network agencies now, engaging with us properly, and not just finding out but looking at the manifestos implementing them, and the point of joining CAN is it's not a badging exercise, it's not just a kind of okay well let's just go in another industry initiative where people have to go through the process to look at the manifestos look at 13 practices. Look at the processes that they've got and then once they've done that, then publicly say that yes we are part of CAN. That’s what O2 did really well. They did it properly they did it seriously they took their time that way. They sort of socialised it within their business throughout their business from CMO to now CEO to CSR and Marketing. It’s culturally imbedded within their business rather than sitting within just one department.
Sonoo: Very quickly, Harriet do you actually agree with what Jack said that action is more possible now than it was before?
Harriet: Yes I do, I think that actually organisations have started with the news agenda over the last six months, arguably the last four years. Organisations are really starting to think about.
Sonoo: Almost being forced to.
Harriet: Yes, absolutely. Every time you turn on the news, we have another story that's coming out and some form of our digital information environment is implicated in that. Then it becomes really important for everyone within that information environment to be to be looking at these issues really really carefully. We know that millions of dollars of ad money are going to funding some of the misinformation that drives some of the civil unrest, we know that brands are appearing in places that they really didn't ever wish to appear. All of that is breaking down barriers, I think is to adopting initiatives like Conscious Advertising Network. Obviously, I wish that it would happen differently, I don't think it should take that's for people to look at looking at considering where their media spend is going. But what I think is super encouraging is that the organisations we've seen, and only a portion of our members on public. We're still talking to a lot of organisations in the background who, for either one way or another want to wait for a certain stage to go public, with their membership or who are working up to doing it in another way.
What's really encouraging is the people that we see are coming to us with, not just the marketing team but often set up some form of cross department departmental working group. Other organisations are using champions or ambassador type schemes within their organisation to ensure that they're changing things from a grassroots level upwards. So, I totally agree with Jake, I think, unfortunately it's the news agenda I think that that has driven some of it, but I think the result of that is really encouraging. I think, you in terms of budgets being cut I still think that diverse teams create better work, which will make you more resilient and creative in the longer term. Considering your media spend, and where that funding is going to keep your brand resilient. I think that organisations are thinking longer-term and thinking about these issues.
Sonoo: Now that we've heard the story of how it came about and also obviously your intentions and purpose for Conscious Advertising Network. Can you tell us about the specific topic to be covering the conscious podcast series?
Jake: So, the first one that we're going to be talking about his brand neutrality. Why creativity and why advertising has consequences. I think one of the things that Harriet and I talked a lot about is advertising and brands don't live in a vacuum and the biggest brands now are beginning to make statements and interventions into society. The second one is making the ad industry more sustainable, obviously the Advertising Association has it’s, working groups on climate. We've got caught 26 in November next year in Glasgow, the update of the Paris Climate Agreement and the Great Reset has just been launched by the Purpose Disruptors challenging the industry to creatively contribute to the climate emergency
We're talking about inadvertent funding so funding hate speech disinformation, and that's now very broad, funding hate speech for example, as far afield as India we're talking to groups in India we are talking to groups in Australia an the US. Again, back to climate, to climate change denial and lies & misinformation, of which is becoming a pandemic in itself. Then we've got also talking about blacklisting and how we can fund a diverse and pluralistic media and protect quality journalism. That is also because of lazy blocklists is being funding is being cut off because content verification systems, and advertisers are just saying, ‘Oh, it's too difficult. Let's just block coronavirus George Floyd and black lives matter, because it's all too difficult’, and that clearly then the funds quality journalism so that's a kind of whistle-stop tour through some of them, we can go into them in more depth…
Sonoo: …and you've got one, because you've got a six-part series you've got one for Christmas as well. Haven’t you Harriet?
Harriet: We do. So, we're going to be doing a bit of a roundup on what presumably will continue to be an exciting news agenda but also some of the stuff that was being covered in the previously released.
Sonoo: Brilliant. So, thank you both of you for having me. Thank you both of you for actually talking through the Conscious Advertising Network also huge thank you to our hosts the Factory Originals Podcast Lounge who hosted us today, and also The Nerve Music Library as well.