EPISODE 2 - INADVERTENT FUNDING - TRANSCRIPT

Host Sonoo Singh - Founder, The Creative Salon

Jerry Daykin - EMEA Media Director at GSK

Claire Atkin - Founder of Check My Ads

Jake Dubbins - Co-Founder of The Conscious Advertising Network & Founder of Media Bounty.

Sonoo:  Hello and welcome to the Conscious Thinking podcast from the Conscious Advertising Network. This is next in the series of thought-provoking sessions around the question of ‘what is conscious advertising’?, where we are talking in inadvertent funding.  I’m your host Sonoo Singh Founder of Creative Salon and with me I have Jerry Daykin, EMEA Media Director at GlaxoSmithKline, Jake Dubbins Co-Founder of Conscious Advertising Network and Claire Atkin, all the way from Vancouver Canada and Co-Founder of Check My Ads. Thank you guys, thank you for being here. Now what we're discussing really is a big topic, ethical ad spend. So I do want to know, what exactly is that first of all, but let's remind ourselves of the advertiser’s role that happened, not the longer in the summer, of Facebook policies over hate speech. Now, Jerry, can I start with you first of all, because you have talked about ethical exclusion list as being the key consideration for brands in the past, so what do you mean by that?

Jerry:  Yeah, I bought it up alongside the Facebook issue, because it was encouraging to see brands taking decisions about their media based on some sort of big ethical conditions, but my point was it certainly doesn’t end with one platform, a lot of advertising these days is bought through programmatic media, which is computers making the decisions for where the advertising appears and obviously computers make those decisions, millions of times a second to try and work out where those ads are, and they are  not always in great places.  So exclusion lists, which have been called ‘white lists’ in the past but I think it’s good to move away from that language, are just lists that specifically say where you won't appear, they are  largely lists of keywords, obvious ones like terrorism and hate speech related words. The magic technology systems know that your advert should never appear alongside them, which is a great step and a really important step, though we always caution advertisers, that sometimes they end up with ridiculously long keywords on this list that includes a whole bunch of things that are much more general than you you'd imagine like we’ve seen Muslim, lesbian, really all-encompassing lists, but overall it’s great to see advertisers paying attention to where their money is going,

Sonoo:  Claire, can I bring you in here now? Because when we talk about ethics, it’s a big word in itself, but ethical behaviour in relation to brands. Now that is quite relative and some of the imposing standards could be quite complex. How or where do you think we need to begin to counter such big challenges? 

Clare:  In the last 10 years of digital marketing, we have lost touch with what marketing is supposed to do even in the first place. So, as marketers our job is to, of course, raise awareness, it is of course to educate about our products, but digital marketing has forgotten that there is a third thing that we want to do as marketers and that is to engender trust. We are here at an ethics conversation, not because we love to speak about philosophy, but because the ad tech world has not been designed by marketers, it has been designed by people who are optimising for KPIs and reach instead of for trust. We've forgotten that third piece. So as marketers, this is not so much about how it feels to be marketers, this is about the fact that as a business, we are not doing a whole job, we are not doing the complete job that is required of us,

Sonoo:  Jake, Conscious Advertising Network was almost born out of this need as in that job hasn't been done and indeed the job for Conscious Advertising Network would be done when, you know, something like this organisation actually doesn't really need to exist in a way. Do you agree with what both Jerry and Claire have said when it comes to ethical spending?

Jake:  Yeah, Claire made the point that we’ve forgotten what it what it means to be marketers. I also think that because we haven't designed the systems that serve the ads in a way that it is sort of human first, society first, we've kind of raced to ever more efficient advertising, raced to the bottom without taking due care and paying attention to the unintended consequences of that race to the bottom. What that therefore means in practice, and what we talk about in terms of inadvertent funding, is that we are now funding everything from you know, we talked about hate speech, Islamophobia, misinformation against the Black Lives Matter movement for example, misinformation about COVID, COVID denial, climate science denial, all of these things is trying to put Pandora’s box back in together, as opposed to starting with people and society first, and then broadening that out. I don't think any marketer gets into the industry to go right now I've got to be the arbiter of what content I should be funding online, but here we are. That’s now a statement of fact, the investments that we make in media are directly funding harmful narratives, the content that we just discussed, and the organisations behind that content, so we need to take responsibility for that.

Sonoo:  Well, what we're largely saying is Jerry it's all your fault really, it’s the brands not doing the job. But obviously I’m being slightly facetious here. I don't need to spell out all the challenges that are at the doorstep of the brands, especially marketers, and trying to justify not just being the marketer, but the spenders as well and what they're spending on. Do you think all of this has compounded and probably set back that move for ethical ad spend, and I'm not just talking about you or GlaxoSmithKline but looking at the industry?

Jerry: Yes, in some way I don’t disagree with the challenge that this is all marketers fault, because the end of the day, it's our money, we sit at the top of the tree and we should have more responsibility.           I think it is a remarkably complicated ecosystem we live in these days, however much you try and simplify it down, you still end up with graphs of DSPs, SSP’s all sorts of stuff and then if you see one of those crazy LUMAscapes of everyone involved in it, it's like, oh my gosh, how could a marketer understand that?    And I guess one of the messages of that we have in CAN is that you don’t need to understand all of that you just need to start understanding some of the right questions to be asking. Most big advertisers have an agency, in that agency there are experts in this stuff. But those experts will only start work in your account, those settings will only get in place if you start asking the right questions. So arranging a meeting with your agency and saying look, in my briefs I want to be really clear, this matters to me and I don’t want to appear on hundreds of thousands of websites, I want to appear on quality websites, I want you to make sure I'm not appearing on the bad stuff. I want you to make sure I am funding really good stuff. All of that is something that any marketer can say, you may not technically understand how the system does it, but probably people in your team, your agency team around you will do. So yeah. I think that complexity of it does make it harder for marketers to get their head around it. As Jake was hinting at, not many marketers took the jobs thinking they were going to have to be the arbiter of ethics in the first place. The good news is there are frameworks, like the CAN framework, and agencies and experts out there who can help you, but it does start by asking the right questions. If you don’t ask those questions, no one in your supply chain is going to start solving it for you. 

Sonoo:  Asking the question that’s obviously the starting point, you know, with your Check My Ads hat on Claire, they’re always new bad actors emerging at every single point and obviously and considerations that the industry was probably not aware of say just yesterday. What does that mean for your role then? What are the considerations that you make? How do you even start educating the industry?

Claire:  When people come to us, they are usually on marketing teams or comms teams. Usually they have really big budgets, hundreds of millions per year maybe sometimes as low as 15 million, but these are people who have put an incredible investment into the open web, into programmatic advertising. They say ‘hi’, check my ads, we've checked our ads, we've taken a look and we just need a universal blocklist. So, could you give us a list of bad sites? And we say it's impossible, because as you say, it’s changing every day. So instead what we do is we run workshops, and we help build what Jerry called a spec sheet so that you can give that to your agency and we build the brand policy guidelines for brands to say this is what is and is not appropriate. These are the tools that we expect you to use. So, what are those tools? Because everything is changing every day and marketers are not by default, professionals who understand how adversarial narratives, conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns, travelled through the open web. We have to rely on other experts, non-profits, research organisations, think tanks, and we have an incredible toolbox to our disposal that we end up bringing in and pulling into these advertising boardrooms.

Jake:  I would like to add to that if that’s ok, because I think Claire makes a really good point in so far that the industry needs to look outside the industry. A lot of the work that we do at CAN is working with civil society groups and non-profits and government or international government agencies like the UN, to define what the bad stuff is, we don't necessarily know what the next QAnon is gonna be. We don't know what the next conspiracy theory is gonna be? Again, marketers didn't get into this to future gaze and go well what’s going to be next? ZAnon telling people that Hollywood celebrities are going to eat old people or something?  Nobody knows what the next conspiracy theory is going to be..

 Jerry::  Well, if it does you heard it here first (several laughs and few words spoken over each other).

Jake: But I think that that partnership with civil society, that partnership with activist groups, that partnership with human rights experts, human rights lawyers and understanding that, is vital for the health of the industry, that in turn funds the internet  that is the narrative of our and us as human beings.

Sonoo:  Can I bring in Jerry to this one? Because what I'm curious about is what are the incentives that is in there for marketers therefore? I'm not saying that all marketers are obviously the bad actors in this whole conversation. However, marketers do do the path of least resistance and when you're talking block lists it comes from a place of biases in the first instance. I mean, what is it that motivates you as a marketeer to make sure that you carry on those conversations, you continue to investigate those blocklists?

Jerry:  Yeah, with topics like this and broader outline of diversity inclusion, there's always two sides isn’t there.  There's one like, do the right thing for society and make the world a better place, and hopefully that is a big motivator for a lot of people – but maybe not all of them. There's always an argument about doing the right thing for your brand, growing your business as well, I think it squarely comes through in here. Nearly all the steps you can take to improve your supply chain, not only stop you funding bad stuff, but they actually make your advertising work more effectively. I think a lot of the places your ads could be showing up as bad are just places you wouldn't want to be.

I can talk to real experience on that. I used to work in Diageo, a big global alcohol company and they introduced something called the Trusted Market Place which was an aggressive approach, saying we will only advertise on platforms that we can validate and confirm and say, meets the standards.  And media plans started coming in where the costs were going up drastically because we weren't buying that really long tail of super cheap and seemingly wonderful and magical inventory. Pretty soon afterwards they also found their effectiveness was going up, that it was delivering more, that actually paying a premium to a) be on more premium sites, which I think we sometimes we marketers lose sight of the fact that not every impression is equal, there are impressions you should pay more for. And frankly, also just cutting off a lot of longtail, which probably had fraud, probably wasn't quality even if it claims to be viewable. So I think you'll find marketers as you go on this journey, even if you don't think that, stopping hate speech and QAnon is part of your job, making your media spend work harder and actually reaching consumers in better places, absolutely is.

Sonoo:  But also, continuing this theme of actually what the motivations are there for the marketeers, Claire can I ask you, how many times and we hear these stories again and again, how many times you hear the statement, we will not aware of this placement? And you know, what do you even do about that? That's such a lazy thing to begin with?  Are you counting?

Claire:  Isn’t it lazy.   So, the answer is thousands, I mean, so my co-partner Nandini has actually worked with Sleeping Giants and about 400,000 people to help bring awareness to the problem of funding disinformation. She and her co-founder actually worked with over 4000 brands, just on Twitter and Facebook to let them know that their ads were funding the disinformation and white supremacy site Breitbart.com.    So the answer is, this is a huge issue across the board. Just yesterday, I noticed that Elections BC where I live where we are hosting an election right now, Elections BC, whose job it is to be nonpartisan and to just get out the vote is actually funding a disinformation site and I let them know and they immediately fixed it, but of course, the answer was again, oh my god we had no idea. Thanks so much we’ve worked with our agency to fix this. So right now, that might still hold water, but I don't think it will in the very near future.  And the brands who are getting ahead of this are the ones who are going to look competent and strong, as everything shifts, because of course the risk is not only that you are funding things that are terrible for our communities and our democracies, the risk is also that you look like you just don't know what you're doing. And that sucks.

Sonoo:  Can I ask a question and playing devil's advocate and probably Jake you can come in this. What would you say to critics who talk about how, what Claire has just mentioned, this might be dangerous to the diversity of voices and content, therefore the internet?

Jake:  Yeah, I think that certainly a lot of what we talk about is that anybody has the right to say whatever they like within the laws of the land. But they don't necessarily have the right to be given a megaphone to reach millions of people, and they also don't have the right to be paid for it either. So, we at CAN are a staunch defender of freedom of speech, and we absolutely need diversity of voices, and we need to have healthy debate, but there was also a lines as well and certainly within our work in hate speech for example, we draw a line as a term dehumanisation and drawing on the expertise of the United Nations who have obviously seen atrocities happening in parts of the world where dehumanising language was used in the lead up to those atrocities. If for example you start having content that talks about rats, vermin and cockroaches, we've seen recently replicants, then that’s very dangerous content that has been shown in 1930’s Germany, before the Rwandan massacre, before the Rohingya massacre that that turns into real world violence. So obviously we need to have healthy debate, freedom of speech, diversity of voices but we also have got to recognise where the line is, and obviously no marketer wants to find their ads next to content calling people / groups of people cockroaches or vermin

Claire:  This is where I want to be very clear about what kind of block lists are helpful and what kind of are not helpful. Because of course, block lists that that identify certain publishers as repetitious publishers of speech that is dangerous, can be incredibly useful. But when you start looking for words like vermin, or rats, or cockroaches anytime the conversation goes, well we can actually identify it using words, we just have to be super explicit, that keyword block lists, block lists that use a whole bunch of terms, in order to try to avoid being next to awkward or ‘controversial’ articles are actually still really problematic. What they do is they obfuscate the entire idea of brand safety, which is to not fund bad faith publishers and organisations. You do not want your money going towards them, but then of course the other side of it is that it blocks the news. It actually blocks more than the news we found out recently that a blogger by the name of something Dicks also gets blocked by keyword lists. So she's a recipe blogger, she does a really great job publishing brownie mixes, but it comes up as brand unsafe. She cannot get funding because of how silly these keyword lists work. So block lists yes for publishers, buy keyword lists no, it really is not a smart way to block your ads.

Sonoo:  Jerry, I would imagine you would agree to a lot of it. Obviously easier said than done when you're talking about picking the right partner or platform with your marketing investment. But where does it leave diverse media for instance, which is generally not really well known, as a media partner.  What that basically means is that as a marketer, as a brand who would need to do that much extra legwork and homework to find out. If you did need to invest in diverse voices, where does that leave you?  

Jerry:  Yeah, I think the technology's getting a little bit better. So there’s sort of, not just keywords but like semantics and things and I 100% agree with what Claire was saying.  Actually, I think there has been slight breakdown in the concept of brand safety. It's sort of a mixture of brand safety and brand suitability, and as Claire was saying, you absolutely don't want to fund the bad actors.   I mean you can get into a more nuanced conversation about which kind of content your brand does and doesn't want to appear alongside and there are very good reasons why as a healthcare brand or travel brand, there might be things you’d exclude, and I think as we've jumped from TV to digital, we have sometimes chased that and yet keyword blocklist which as I said at the start are, in some ways, the right step in the right direction, and definitely bring some really bad potential downsides.  In terms of if you are using keywords and like I say, advertisers who very casually throw in Muslim, lesbian because you know that could be associated with terrorism or which could be associated with something a bit risqué, whereas you know, 99% of the content around that is positive and stories you want to be told. Or even if you're going to a more locked down look, and you're really focusing on a positive site list  choosing the sites you want to appear on is possible, but it can be hard work, but it is possible. Then I think you do have to be really cautious in that. Back to the Diageo example, one thing we found quickly early on is some of our brands, Smirnoff for instance, really wanted to talk to minority communities, they did a lot of stuff with the LGBT community and they found that that those platforms weren't initially in their site lists. We at GSK, we’ve been working with Brand Advance, that's a network that works across lots of diversity publishers, I know some of the big agency groups have started to kind of pull together a lists of great diversity publishers. So there are ways around it. But you have to a) make sure you’re not being blunt in what you are blocking, and then b) start asking those questions. How do I appear on these publishers? How do I make sure more of my media funds diverse opinions, diverse thought, because we're not here to shut down lines of thought, we are here to encourage more and fund more.

Sonoo:  So the last question I really have is the practical side of it. So when we are talking about ethical media spend do you have a top three or top five things that brands should consider? How do you even start behaving for instance, Claire, shall we start with you then?

Claire:  Sure, well at Check My Ads we are begging marketers to check your ads please. Literally, go to your site placement list, and look through the list and who you are funding. If you need to go through because there can be hundreds of thousands of sites on this list, which is of course a problem unto itself, organise it by amount that you've spent per site, and start there and then go down. That way you can actually see where your impact is. So that's the first thing. The second thing is check your inclusion list. See where you want to be. Make sure that you're not missing things where you really should be maybe local news sites, maybe different blogospheres so you want to be where your brand would be most strong, most powerful. Then the third thing is, of course, check your exclusion lists. Because over time, if you're using, especially if you're using keyword blocking technology, these lists get longer and longer and longer. If there's a shooting in a small town, suddenly, the name of the small town gets blocked, that also blocks the name of the local newspaper. So you need to go in and double check that because you could actually be harming and taking away money from local news, when you're just trying to do a good job in marketing. 

Sonoo: Yeah, Jake, obviously, not only do you run Conscious Advertising Network, but you have your own agency Media Bounty, as well. So in terms of the advice that you give to your clients, what is it that you say to them? 

Jake:  I think there are a couple of things of what we do. One is making sure that people are aware, awareness is a big thing. We talked about people who still throw up their arms and say ‘I didn’t know’ and Claire made the point earlier, well, that time of not knowing is probably going to be at an end pretty pretty soon. We advise clients and our whole team to get up to date with the issues that we're facing right now, what is the language that we need to be abreast of, there’s plenty of tools out there you know, GARM have recently published the definitions of the online HARM definitions, 4A’s in the US have a white paper on misinformation that’s really good and a big step forward. Obviously CAN has the guidance in the manifesto, so I think again, asking these questions, having the conversations about the issues that we are all facing, so whether that be COVID now, but also mentioned earlier, that climate change is going to be the next big hot issue and understanding that if we're starting to fund the climate science denial, are we funding our own extinction for example?  Having those conversations and then putting it in the briefs. Jerry made the point earlier that it's much, much bigger than one platform and these problems are not immediately going to go away overnight, We are not going to overnight suddenly go ‘ah we’ve solved all the problems and we can disappear’. There are other platforms coming to the fore, obviously TikTok’s taking steps in its policies, but Triller is beginning to gain traction in the States for example. So if brands put principles and ethics in the contracts and therefore make sure that the entire ecosystem is asking the right questions that Jerry talked about earlier, and is every time now, in three years time and in five years time, we're talking about misinformation and hate speech and what we're doing to mitigate that, then it kind of feels to us but you know, what goes in the contract often gets done, and if that's paired with the right sort of training, the right sort of information for people actually doing the job in agencies, then we feel that, that will make a significant impact. 

Sonoo:  And Jerry, you being the champion, indeed the cheerleader, when it comes to ethical media for a long time now. What would you say to the industry? 

Jerry: These guys have said it already. I think Claire in particular nailed it when she said ask to see the site list. It’s one of the first things I said when I joined my team at GSK. If the answer you get back is that’s quite difficult, it’s too long or something like that, I think that has some red flags in itself. Exactly what those guys have said, it starts by asking the right questions it starts by just paying a bit more attention to this stuff. And you'll find as soon as you start paying attention, a lot of stuff falls magically into place. I would say follow the Conscious Advertising Network, follow Claire, follow people on Twitter, because when new things come up, and new challenges come up, you can learn from that. And also just don’t worry if you don’t fully understand it, don’t feel like you can solve it all. Let’s be blunt, you never can solve it all. Companies I have worked at have done loads and loads of stuff in this space, we've still been caught out and found our ads in bad places. I think really publicly showing that you care about this stuff, signing up to something like Conscious Advertising Network. There's no guarantee you will never appear anywhere. It's rather than just saying ‘oh, I didn't know that placement was there”, you can say well I do look at my placements and I do make really positive stances around this and this one has gone through and it’s absolutely not okay.   But you start at a better place if you're really clear. Even put it on your website, show what you're doing. Yeah, exactly what the other guy’s have just said.

Sonoo:  And then what all of you are saying is come together and work in collaboration and take Jerry’s words so that everything magically falls into place as well (laughing).  So thank you to all my guests, Jerry Daykin from GlaxoSmithKline, Claire Atkins from Check My Ads and Jake Dubbins from Conscious Advertising Network.

This is the Conscious Thinking Podcast from the Conscious Advertising Network. Thank you for listening, and also a huge thank you to our friends The Rattle Collective and The Nerve.

Keep tuned in as there's lots more to come. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye.