Notes To Supporters

Hi everyone

It’s been less than a month since the original Cog Blog post on 25th April kicked off what has become known as the ‘Who Cares?’ movement.

This is to update you on the latest progress towards the event we’re planning in London on September 12th.

• We now have almost 150 active supporters – far more than we anticipated. These are all people who have come to us. We haven’t yet done anything to enlist support, although that is about to change, with your help.

• Many wish, for perfectly understandable reasons to remain anonymous. We will continue to keep the supporter list hidden, but we will be writing to some of you individually to ask if we might use your names in promoting what we’re up to.

• Some of you have already volunteered active help and support: we are very grateful to the London media agency the7stars (the largest UK independent agency), and their Founder Jenny Biggam for offering to design a logo, and backdrop for the event, and for her and her colleagues’ advice and support in promoting ‘Who Cares?’ to their contacts and friends.

• We have mentioned the PR agency The Digital Voice and their Founder Julia Linehan who as well as helping us with a soon-to-be-activated PR programme, have also kindly offered on-the-ground support at the event.

• We are also pleased to be in contact with a group in the US pulled together by Matt Prohaska with overlapping ambitions to our own. Matt invited Nick and me to the group’s first meeting and we are consequently now in contact with many in the US.

• The event we are planning is now fixed for the afternoon of September 12th, at the Royal Society of Arts building at 8 John Adam Street, London, WC2. Thanks to Vic Davies for helping us with this.

• The plan is to start at about 12:30pm and run till about 5pm. But all timings are still to be confirmed.

• We will be charging those wishing to attend. This will be a modest amount to cover the hire of the venue and any third-party costs (like catering). The fee will be confirmed very soon (once we’ve met with the RSA). Any surplus will be donated to NABS, the advertising industry’s charity.

• Our proposal is to discuss five key topics:

  • Trading, transparency and trust

  • Agency business models

  • Measurement and accountability

  • Recruitment and well-being

  • Ethics, sustainability and privacy

• We know that creativity in all its forms is a hugely important topic; but we think that may be best tackled through another means. We’ll revert on that one.

• These are only our suggestions; we always said we wanted the agenda to be crowd-sourced so we are open to persuasion when it comes to changing any of these.

However, we think 5 is pretty well the limit given we only have the afternoon.

• Whatever the final topics, we don’t want this to become a whinge-fest. We all know what the issues are, the problems and concerns and we don’t think there’s anything to be gained by listing them. 

Instead, we want to focus on pragmatic solutions, ways to make things better.

• Once we have the final list of topics, we are going to propose an ‘ideas champion’ for each. Anyone can then choose to contribute thoughts to the ideas champion of greatest relevance and interest to them.

• Each ideas champion will then present the thoughts of their group to all attendees at the event in September.

• We are hoping to top and tail the event with two speeches from leading figures. We know who we want; feelers are being extended…

We are both very conscious that this whole thing could be seen as a few oldies harking back to the ‘good old days’. We clearly don’t think that’s what this is, we have many younger professionals amongst our supporters who share our concerns and frustrations, but we are aware of the possible criticism.

Nick has put together a background note on ‘Who Cares?’ which is attached to this mail. Do feel free to use this whenever and to whomever you like. We want to attract more interest and support, so hopefully this will help.

There’s also as background Nick’s The Media Leader piece on Principal-Based Media which is clearly a related hot topic, especially in the US.

Finally, the latest Cog Blog will be out later in the week; I’ll send this around separately to the group.

If you have any thoughts on the topics for September, please do let one of us know as soon as you can. Otherwise, we’ll go with the five above.

Thanks again to everyone for the support.

More soon…

BRIAN and NICK