Notes To Supporters

This is to report on what we've been up to, and our thinking on what's next. We would greatly welcome your thoughts on the points that follow.

• Numbers. We are up to about 120 active supporters - far more than we expected. We're both delighted with this. The original blog post was accessed by about 4,000, a record for one of my posts.

• New blog. Here's the latest blog, out today: https://www.bjanda.com/blog/advertising-who-cares-lets-start/. Some of you subscribe to my blogs and so will already have seen this. If you want to subscribe (it's free) just let me know and that way you'll receive Cog Blog posts as soon as they go up.

• New 'The Media Leader' piece. Nick's piece has been widely circulated, but in case you missed it, here's a link: https://the-media-leader.com/nick-manning-who-cares-wins-the-antidote-to-badvertising/

• Event. As you know we are planning an event to discuss the many issues raised by the Who Cares initiative. This will be in London, on September 12th. We imagine a half-day, the afternoon. We are scouting locations at the moment, and several of you are kindly helping us with that, but save the day!

• Spread the word. We want the event, indeed the whole debate to be open to everyone. We have heard from consultancies, media agencies, creative agencies, research businesses, advertisers, trade bodies and from UK, USA, Canada, Holland, Germany, France, Singapore, China, Australia and New Zealand. If you can amplify the message still further that would be great!

• It has been suggested that some of you far from the UK would like to be connected so that you can talk informally. We certainly have no objection to that - we think this idea can travel - and so I'll be sending a separate email introducing those in Australia, NZ, China and Singapore to each other.

• Shine a light. The late great Leonard Cohen wrote 'There's a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in' . We have not heard anything officially from the platforms, the adtech giants, most of the large media auditors / consultancies, or the holding companies. This doesn't surprise us. What has surprised us is the fact that we have heard from individuals within these organisations writing to us in a private capacity and wanting to help. We are happy to guarantee anonymity to anyone supporting us, and naturally we hope that those so far not engaging decide to do so and to show up in September to put their point-of-view.

• Press support. We have had messages of support from Omar Oakes, Editor of The Media Leader' in the UK, and from Jack Myers, Owner of the MediaVillage platform in the US. It's great to have their support and encouragement. If you know anyone else particularly within the more general business press who may be interested, we would love to hear from them.

• We are very grateful to Julia Linehan and her business The Digital Voice (www.thedigitalvoice.co.uk) for providing us with PR support and advice as a media partner. 

• Agency support. Several agencies are offering us services like logo design, collateral material, media amplification ideas and execution, and a host of other useful services. We are very grateful to them - and once we have their permission we'll certainly reveal who they are!

• Coming soon. We have the offer of a podcast platform and will be announcing details of how we intend taking this up very shortly.

Moving on to the most important topic and one where we need your feedback the most - the event in September.

We don't want to make this a typical conference, with speeches and panels featuring sponsors and pay-to-play speakers. We want this to be collaborative, addressing the key topics unearthed by the Who Cares initiative.

What we have in mind to achieve this is setting up a series of topics. We're not sure yet how many, maybe 5 or 6. We will ask for volunteers from this list who would be prepared to work over the coming weeks on one (or more) of these topics, organised under a topic leader. How that is managed is up to the leaders, and their teams.

Come September we're thinking that each topic team will be given the platform to expose their ideas and to ask for participants' endorsement.

Those endorsed ideas then form the basis of work going forward.

What we need to know now is: 

Do you like this idea? Would you be prepared to give up some time to this arrangement?

We are very grateful to the many messages of support we have received. To state again, if you know anyone who might be interested to join us then do encourage them to contact us. We know it's hard for employees of certain organisations to go public in their support for our ideas, so if they would like to support us anonymously and thus receive emails etc then of course we can do that.

All the best and more soon.