• by Maarten Albarda , Featured Contributor, September 27, 2024

On Sept. 12, the Advertising: Who Cares movement held its first in-person conference… no workshop… nope: "idea exchange" at the Royal Society of Arts in London. Why am I telling you this? Because – full disclosure – I contributed to its “Trading, Transparency and Trust” workstream, along with a global who’s who from the industry. But more importantly, I am telling you this because I care about our industry -- and it’s in desperate need of improvement.

The movement was started by Brian Jacobs (ex Leo Burnett, Carat, Universal McCann, and Kantar) and Nick Manning (founder of UK’s Manning Gottlieb Media, CEO of OMD UK, and then with Ebiquity and Medialink). Its aim is “to create a community of likeminded professionals who understand what’s broken, are collectively smart enough to ideate how to fix the problem and passionate and powerful enough to deliver what needs to be done.”

The movement is platform-, employer- and interest group-agnostic, and aims to seek solutions that are “right” for the industry as a whole and not for one walled garden, or one specific industry niche or interest group. There are works streams covering topics that impact the well-being of our industry, and perhaps, even more importantly, its recipients (that is, consumers) and its stakeholders (the ad industry at large, as well as educators, legislators, etc.).

Michael Farmer is leading the Business Models Workstream. The Trading, Transparency and Trust Workstream was led by Jenny Biggam, founder of the UK media independent The Seven Stars. Route Research’s CEO Denise Turner was at the helm of the Measurement and Accountability Workstream. The Recruitment and Well-Being Workstream was led by Crispin Reed of Skyscraper Consulting, and the Brands and Journalism Workstream was under the guidance of Ruben Schreurs, CSO at Ebiquity who presented with Hardeep Matharu, Founder and Editor of the Byline Times.

There were also opening remarks from Lucy Jameson, founder of Uncommon Creative Studio, on “Creativity and Craft.”

It was, in short, a stellar lineup in front of a sold-out house.

What was different about this idea exchange was the fact that each workstream had a working group who guided their speaking representative on their topic. And that the brief for the presentation was to come with proposed solutions, not a rehashing of the problems. This was refreshing, as we all kinda know what the problems are. If not, I recommend you just read some of my older columns from the past 10 years.

So, did the event succeed? Well… yes, because new ideas, or germs of a new idea, were presented. Yes, because speakers and participants stuck to the brief and came to help find or ideate solutions. But the most important accomplishment was that it brought together a very large group of people who want the industry to do and be better.

The idea for the event was that it would create a starting point for each of these work streams, to build something that would lead to improvement within that particular aspect of the industry. And ultimately, by combining them all, to help the industry as a whole.

It was high time a movement like this was started. It is now up to us to see it through.