Our Manifesto

The advertising industry is by common consent a less attractive place to be these days. It has become a place where machines have replaced people, jobs have become soul-less, and data is treated as royalty. And this before AI really gets into its stride.

The advertising itself has deteriorated. Much present-day advertising is simply ineffective; the majority is inefficient and wasteful. Much of it is unaccountable, untrackable, unmeasurable or simply not measured at all.

It abuses the privacy of the public and treats them as ‘product’.

It bombards people with irrelevant and pointless ads.

It enriches criminals through fraud, with half of the ads placed being wasted on bots not humans.

‘Viewability’ is both poor, and poorly defined.

Furthermore, a lot of it harms the environment.

In short, advertising could be said to exist to make the adtechindustry and the big platforms even wealthier.

Consequently, the ad industry is no longer an attractive one for people starting out. Rewards have stagnated since the early 2000s. Many jobs are mundane.

The reputation of the industry has suffered.

Much of the craft that created high quality advertising that people enjoyed and even welcomed has been diluted.

Content that entertains, informs, persuades and works is in extremely short supply.

What can and should be done to address these realities? How do we address ‘badvertising’?

The truth is we don’t yet know but the first step must be to throw some light into the debate. Brian Jacobs and Nick Manning have teamed up to bring together a group of people who care about advertising and the ad business.

We will be holding a half-day seminar on September 12th in London to explore ideas. We won’t be re-stating the problems, everyone knows what they are in outline if not in detail.

What we are interested in is ideas, solutions and discussion that address the truth of our industry and which aim to heighten awareness of the need for change.

Since we started talking publicly about this initiative we have had over 140 ‘volunteers’ offering to take part. We have invited no-one to do so; people have raised their hands. We have people throughout the world wanting to help.

There is a similar movement in the US. We have the support of The Media Leader, a PR agency and two media agencies. All of which is voluntary.

Some would-be volunteers have offered private support but daren’t go public.

Our seminar will tackle some 5 or 6 of the weightiest subjects. These will be selected by our volunteers from a short list. We will appoint ‘ideas champions’ for each workstream. 

We are now keen to start approaching well-known figures from all sides of the industry to make them aware of the ‘Who Cares?’ movement.

We are also keen to invite high profile figures to the September 12th event to help us in our goal of raising awareness. We are planning on top-and-tailing the event with a couple of these people speaking on what can be done to improve the advertising industry.

We are keen to attract people who care and are happy to lend their support publicly.

We don’t know what will happen as a result, but we already envisage a continuous stream of material around these subjects, possibly a book, podcasts and social media. We want this to live as a movement, not just an event.

Just what form it takes will emerge as the discussions continue, and at the focal-point of the September 12th event.

We’ve learned over the last few weeks that people do care; wewant to help them make a difference. The support of well-known industry figures would help greatly and would be highly appreciated.