Thinkbox
It started with an idle chat over a cup of coffee. I met up with Brian Jacobs to suggest we convene a group of people to talk about how we can improve advertising and the advertising industry.
Brian suggested we call it ‘Advertising: Who Cares?’ and offered to write a blog to see if anyone was interested in helping us make the world a better place for the public and for the people who work in advertising.
Two months later we have:
- Been inundated with support. Over 250 people have offered to help from all over the world
- Had our website built for free by Blutui in New Zealand (thanks, Graeme)
It’s www.advertisingwhocares.org.
- Had our logo designed by The7Stars, also for free (thanks, Anuschka, Jenny and team)
- Booked the venue for our launch on the afternoon of September 12th at the Royal Society of Arts, starting at 2pm and sold a lot of tickets (at cost price)
- Created five works-streams with great team-leaders and numerous volunteers to think about the future for the most important aspects of our industry (see the website).
Thanks to Michael Farmer, Jenny Biggam (again!), Denise Turner, Crispin Reed and Ruben Schruers for agreeing to lead.
- Enticed Lucy Jameson of Uncommon to deliver her opening thoughts
- Approached other great speakers whom we hope to confirm shortly
- Been supported by a number of trade associations, including Thinkbox (thanks, Lindsey) and egta (thanks, Katty) and the Advertising Association (thanks, Stephen)
- Had innumerable people saying that they support us privately even if they can’t publicly
- Had numerous amazing conversations with other people who care
- Been reminded that our industry is full of bright, motivated and kind people
So, why is ‘Who Cares?’ important and why now?
In brief, because good advertising matters and there isn’t enough of it around these days. We need advertising that treats its audience with respect and is relevant, engaging and effective.
Because we need advertising to fund great media and especially high quality, responsible and unbiased journalism.
And because good advertising takes skill and craft and we need to apply our expertise to make it better.
For everyone and in every channel.
And we need to provide our people with ‘employment and enjoyment’ while attracting, rewarding and retaining the stars of the future.
Why now?
Because advertising and our industry have lost their mojo.
We are bombarding people with too many ads that are ineffective, intrusive and invasive.
Increased automation driven by AI could add to this.
We have become slaves to data, much of it misleading (at best) and people’s jobs have become routine. Some of the spark has been lost.
We don’t need to labour the other issues that we’ve all been talking about for years. We all know what’s wrong but we need to use our collective ingenuity to come up with ideas and solutions.
Richard Huntington wrote a piece last year called ‘We need to think more about advertising’ and has continued to write about the ability of our people to solve business roadblocks for our clients.
Now is the time to do this for ourselves.
So join the ‘Who Cares?’ movement if you care and come to our launch on September 12th when we use our collective nous to address the future needs of our own industry.
And thanks again, Thinkbox.
About Nick Manning
Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb OMD and was CSO at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns mentoring business, Encyclomedia, offering strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industry. He writes for Media Leader each month.