EPISODE 4 - BEYOND BLOCKLISTS - TRANSCRIPT

Host Sonoo Singh - Founder, The Creative Salon

Chris Kenna - Founder, Brand Advance

Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana - Head of Regulation, Impress

Sonoo:  Hello and welcome to the Conscious Thinking Podcast from The Conscious Advertising Network. This is the next in the series of thought provoking sessions around the question of what is conscious advertising, where we are going to be talking about Beyond Blocklists.  I’m your host Sonoo Singh, Founder Creative Salon, with me I have Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, Head of Regulation at independent press regulator Impress and Chris Kenna of Brand Advance, which is a company that connects brands with diverse audiences.  Welcome both of you.

Now 2020 has seen the shift in the tone about conversations brands are having when it comes to ad misplacements and the conversations have evolved from brand safety fears on both YouTube and Facebook, both of which you know about, about whether premium publishers are brand suitable, because in reality blocklists have led to millions in lost revenue but have also shut out minority communities from the internet.  In the name of brand safety, some advertisers are blocking their content from Black Lives Matter, Coronavirus news, LGBT content, even women’s issues.  So what this really is an indicator of something that you, Lexie, have talked about with me before, an indicator of the privileges of the gatekeepers that we probably have.   My first question to you Lexie is that there are obviously some unintended consequences of Blocklists harming regulated and specially crafted journalism which in itself is a rather blunt tool would you agree?

Lexie: Yes unfortunately, and until we start to see platforms come up with beta tools for better ad placement and better brand alignment with content creators, I think we are going to continue to have to suffer this experimentation process, where we end up with, as you say, unintended consequences where we end up with ads alongside content they clearly shouldn’t, or ads don’t end up next to the content that they should – from both an advertiser / client perspective but also from a sustainability perspective … generalists are struggling just as much as the long tail content creators to make sure that their content pays, and having to experiment with a range of user pay models because the advertising system unfortunately just doesn’t best serve independent and diverse generalists and publishers in this day and age. 

Sonoo:  Chris what about you, obviously you’ve been fighting this good fight for a long time, since you set up your business, but also talking about advertising and our industry in general, there’s a knock on effect for agencies and how you reach the impressions, if they are say thousands of key words blocked, anything from ‘sperm whale’ to ‘news’, it’s an issue that clients need to fix but do you think brands have the incentive to do that?

Chris: I think everybody’s got an incentive to do it.  To block races, religions or sexual orientations and to lazily call it brand safety … you know the amount of times that I’ve sat as brand CEO across a group of agencies and the amount of times that the team sat behind me come to me with a blocklist that describes me or describe one of my kids (I’ve got two kids, one’s a mixed raced 15 year old, I’ve told people before that my daughter, both half German / half English, and my daughter is a blond, blue-eyed German and there’s never words that describe her, but there’s plenty of words that describe my son all the time, racial, black, I see words like black man, gay, all these different words you know, their dad is gay and so it’s just a lazy way.  Lexie was saying about the different tools and stuff that are there, we already have sentiment analysis tools we don’t need to block the word Covid any more as we can block negative sentiment around Covid but let ads go next to positive or neutral sentiment around Covid.  Key word blocking is antiquated, it’s old, it’s the old way to do it.  It’s what happened when we first made tech, when we first had digital advertising and then we went ooh, we’re sticking ads and we’re monetising where we don’t want to.  As part of The Conscious Advertising Network, as a Board member, you know I’m 100% behind making sure that not a single thing is funded that shouldn’t be.  I don’t want people to fund racism, because you know I’ve experienced it, my kid has experienced it,  I don’t want people to fund homophobia because their dad’s come out as a gay dad – I don’t really experience homophobia but maybe that’s cause I’m quite big (laughs), but we can’t hide behind the fact that we don’t want to do something wrong so we’re just going to block everybody.   And then we’re going to have the audacity to stick a beautiful black box on our socials and tell all black and brown people in the world “I stand shoulder with you” at the same time hitting send on an email with a blocklist to our agencies saying make sure that I don’t go next to any words that have black, blackie, black man, urban, inter-racial, Muslim – how do you consciously do both? The tech is there, the infrastructure is there, you can go to Integral Ad Science and they have a platform, Mantis is a platform that reach users that sentiment analyse, so it’s out there.

Sonoo:  Shall we talk about some of the bigger issues that are at play here, because obviously one of the things that we’re finding ourselves, and not just because of the pandemic, is a really angry, divisive world that we’re living in – do you think the advertising in itself has made the internet less open, less tolerant, less rational ?  I’ll start with you Lexie, because obviously at Impress you are looking not just at the established news, but what constitutes news, what is it that makes content?

Lexie:  Yes I think on that question of whether advertising has contributed to that, well I guess my response would be no more than traditional mainstream advertising media, less open, less tolerant, less rational, because those have always been issues in society, and do I think it’s something inherent to advertising content that makes society less tolerant, no, but do I think there are human decision makers that sit behind these processes that mean that on a systemic level we’re dealing with issues of divisiveness and tolerance and prejudice, absolutely.  And I think that the key is when it comes to advertising funding certain types of content, it’s about the competing interests for those advertisers – do they want their ads placed with highly provocative, controversial content that illicits a strong emotional response or do they want it placed next to a bit of quality of engagement with that content, and I think now the media ecosystem is in as much of a state of flux as it’s ever been.

The old rules don’t apply and there is this growing body of really diverse, pluralistic and independent content creators in the media space and from an advertisers perspective it’s really their choice whether they go out and find them.   If anything, I think compare it back, compare ourselves to thirty years ago, you had six national newspaper brands you sit content behind to be guaranteed to reach your mass audience, now advertisers can be much more shrewd, there’s so many more creators out there so it’s about the willingness to do the research and then find the right platform.

Sonoo:  Indeed.  Chris I can see that you’re nodding furiously so why don’t you jump in?

Chris:  Yes I totally agree, that’s why I’m nodding. And I think that it’s the media owner, the content creator, that they can stir divisiveness.  Fox News is just one example, you know I’m going to call out (SS: go for it), a presenter had content that’s digitally available from Fox News that was inciting people to join a group that ended up killing black people, shooting black people on the streets in America – we all know it.  Now, it took two advertisers to make conscious decisions about what their advertising was going to fund and did that align with their values?  Now I personally advocate for and work with a lot of clients globally, making sure now … advertisers went to a lazy place about where to stick their money (and I can’t speak anything but the truth so here it is in my head), sticking it in the two main 80% of all spend it would go to Facebook or it would go to Google, there is a lot of fantastic quality content out there, in every country there is content that you would want to be next to, some has a voice and I’m not against advertising content going next to a voice, and as a privileged black guy I’ve lived in the UK (before I was in care) and I’ve been asked when I go into a building, even as CEO in my own building, where security has asked me where I’m going, well ‘I’m going to the company that I founded thank you’; I get in a lift and people move their bags to the other side that I’m stood on, or where I go into Selfridges, a shop in the UK if no one knows, as I’m walking around there they never follow my white partner … I live with that and I’m sure people on here have had their own things they have lived with, so I like content, and I like to push our clients, to content to be in safe environments, if you’re going to stick to a black box, but also to keep alive the voices, the smaller publications that represent demographics that look like me. Or other demographics that don’t look like me but look like people who go through hardship or are misunderstood because they are not seen as mainstream.  You know we sort of default mainstream to being straight, white and able-bodied, and it’s just not, we are all mainstream.  It is us and we are them, it’s literally everybody.  

A lot of advertisers have been allies but now we need advertisers to be advocates.  I say it a lot, now we need to move advertisers from ally-ship to advocacy, but actually advertisers can be advocates now as well, it sort of is a win win on so many levels; one, an advertisers own company can see what the company they work for stands for, that they support them, keeping their own house in order and inclusive, allowing for more diversity, because we know diversity is good on the bottom line as well. But also externally, people buying that brand, they get to see that you really do stand for the values that they do and in the moment in this world where everything has got stripped from us, literally the world stopped spinning and we had nowhere to go and we couldn’t get off (laughs), we started noticing demographics that we didn’t know before (obviously I did), but in society now, where we call people key workers, whereas they were always there.  We actually spoke about it a little bit earlier, a black bus driver was always the black bus driver, the Indian lady in the supermarket was always the Indian lady in the supermarket, it’s just that it took a global pandemic for people to call them keyworkers, and to clap and say oh my god I actually see you now. 

These people, the media, the contextual environments that these people find themselves in need to be kept alive, it’s not Google, it’s not Facebook, it’s the other media that I’m sure Lexie represents and some fantastic journalism but there is that balance you know.

Sonoo:   I have a quick added question to that for you Chris, very quickly, if you are talking how the internet is funded, and whether or not it is funded fairly and because of the likes of Google and Facebook where a lot of power obviously lies, what are the alternatives you would say, are there any? 

Chris:  Oh gosh yeah millions.  The alternative to Google and Facebook is independent media.  The alternatives are the voices and the reporters you see out on the street that are walking in Black Lives Matter marches with you, that are out in Poland reporting in LGBT free zones … local reporters maybe not at big life-turning moments but are actually just reporting on what’s going on in your local town, local news, local reporters you know they just let you know what’s going on on the other side of the estate or the other side of the village.  There’s so much content out there, actually I don’t understand how advertising’s got so lazy really, it’s the only words I can use, I know it’s a negative word and I don’t mean to perpetuate negativity on this, but I don’t understand how we got to this lazy position where we say it’s just easier to give it to you or you and I’ll just fluctuate between the both of yous, than it is to fund what everybody in an agency, including CEOs, are reading themselves.

You know as a CEO I read local media, media about different demographics, about new tech start-ups to see if there’s anything I want to invest in, stuff like that, what other CEO’s are doing.  So it’s not like they’re detached from this media, but a little like the election that’s going on across the pond, the first time round the reason why there’s such a mess is because people just didn’t go out and vote.  And I think that advertisers are doing that a little bit with their ad dollars, or they were up until recently, they sat back and said yes I need that I engage with that media personally and I know that my consumers engage with that media but I’m still going to just stick it there or there because it’s easy I know ..

Sonoo:  .. because everybody else is.  You know it’s a fundamental challenge and Lexie you and I have spoken about it between us, sitting on the advisory board for Impress as well, in terms of the funding really, and at Impress that’s what you are always trying to look at, again what does quality journalism look like?  What Chris is talking about, I would love to read my local news but there is a dearth of it because there isn’t enough local news.  Then those lone people, who are called now Influencers, now where is that divide, who defines quality for instance? 

Lexie:  Yeah that’s a really hard question.  I’ll just pick up on Chris’s term laziness, because I think that may be the sum total of the situation we find ourselves in. Where historically there were a set of national media companies that had sales teams in them that drove advertising towards them and we had this very catalystic shift through the introduction of the internet that all of a sudden got gobbled up by the duopoly of Google and Facebook, and all of that media system collapsed and in those catalytic moments you can have a great renaissance where a bunch of local media emerges, a bunch of independent media emerges and all the advertisers gravitate towards them, because all a sudden you have these new and wonderful demographics that you can plunder as an advertiser because of that.  But that just isn’t the ideal reality we live in now, we live in a reality where the easiest path is to go to the duopoly and what that will mean inherently is that the financial stability of these local independent media suffers as the advertiser-pays models just doesn’t work for them.  But then you come to the question of who is the media, who gets to decide what content is valuable, what content we would fund in this ideal scenario and I think that’s a real challenge.  In my role, as a regulator of media, I’m constantly having to think about and question what amounts to quality.

At Impress we have a standards code that says we cannot be inaccurate, we cannot discriminate, you cannot harass people, you cannot invade people’s privacy.  You need to respect the law and its core principles, but the fact is that that’s not a bottom line requirement for being a media operator in the UK or beyond.  We would like to see more publishers, content makers and creatives align themselves with those values, but again it’s a bit of an ouroboros if people are going to fund low quality content, content that arouses emotion, that’s provocative, that’s controversial, that discriminates, that’s inaccurate, that flares public safety issues to the point of hysteria, then there’s less willingness to create that positive, public interest content and high quality content, so we need to have a bit of a circuit break in the system where we say these are the values we want our media, our content creators and influencers to abide by and that’s where the funding is going to go. And unless you create those incentives the system doesn’t work.   So in terms of who are those news makers, those individuals and organisations that we can identify as who delivers that quality, I think this sort of public conversation about that, and we have to build consensus about what those values are which is something we do in our work at Impress, it needs to be wider and we need to have much more public awareness and discourse about what quality is, where we are going to put our eyeballs and who the advertisers are therefore going to want to fund. 

Sonoo:  That’s quite interesting, Chris add to this, because what Lexie is talking about as indicators of both quality and harm, I’m curious about the kinds of conversations that you have with your clients and brands in terms of being comfortable not just about spending in an alternative media, but also how do they think they are being evaluated against those different media that they are investing in? 

Chris:  One thing that we’ve had to do over the years because you know we are a media network with seven to eight hundred publishers all on one network globally, that’s what Brand Advance is, it took us a long time to find these smaller publishers, the bigger ones are easy – your Times of India that gets 300 million unique visitors every month is an easy one to find – but the smaller, especially into sectionality and stuff, I think honestly if we’re going to talk about it the publishers haven’t always been their own best friends.  Whereas the, infighting’s a bit strong, but where one publisher gets within the same demographic of another publisher and thinks of themselves as rivals and doesn’t want to work together, but they are both too small a part to bother … now that advertisers have found platforms, like Google and Facebook, where they can reach tens of, or hundreds of millions of people in one go with one lump sum, publishers need to offer something close to that.  They’ve already got an added bonus, I can give you real media that’s not going to be something that goes against the content regulation or standards that you hold yourself to.  We work with companies and regulatory bodies like Impress, so we are making sure that our content’s good.  The reason why Brand Advance has done well is because the six hundred publishers reaches 1.2 billion people.  Now Unilever can say ok I’m going to take some of my Facebook money away and I’m going to put it in Black and Asian media, because now it’s a big enough thing for them to do.  I think that publishers could do this themselves, Ozone I suppose is one group that did that but there should be more of that you know.  More collaborations of publishers within a certain demographic that keep to a certain standard, and they’ll say ok now they are worth talking to.   If individually you didn’t feel it, now we are.  You know I think that could happen overnight, it could be a sort of overnight blast out that they could certainly tell the world, because they are media owners they’ve got an audience and then can shout about it and that would really help. 

I think secondly brands love patting themselves on the back (all laugh), no matter what, no matter how good they are as a brand.  I’m going to use this as an example, I am biased they are a big and close client of ours, let’s take Unilever.  Unilever is changing the world, they have all the ad dollars, you know more money than God, but they are changing things, a founding partner of GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media), Unstereotype Alliance, right through to the different things they are doing to save rainforests in one country, making sure that out of 150 thousand employees that half of them are female and now they are enforcing that on their agencies – show me your diversity before you get our business – brands like that are really changing things.  But also they like to talk about the change that they are doing, we all know, we’ve probably all got them on LinkedIn, and no one is better at telling the world how good Unilever is than Unilever, but so they should.

Your question was what are other brands looking for when they are doing this?  You can overnight give yourselves something to shout about.   Not once has anyone shouted about how well we are doing on Facebook, not once.   Not once has an advertiser been able to put a press release out about how good they are doing on Google.  Actually it’s probably the opposite, they are hiding the fact that they are spending.   I came into this industry late, I came from the Army, I joined the Army when I was 16, I was in the Army until I was 26 and then went into media in front of the camera, so coming into advertising in my early 30’s there’s still so much I don’t understand.  Not I don’t understand as in how it works, I don’t understand why? There are a lot of things that are just done because it’s always been and I know we’ve been calling advertisers lazy, but actually you know we are given (and I’m talking more about myself rather than from Lexie’s point) people like me, my team and in the wider industry, we are given jobs that are so beautiful and so privileged in that we get to influence, we get to tell people what’s good, what doesn’t look good, we can topple governments, we can raise governments, because propaganda is advertising, just give it another word because it’s not very nice.   So we can do all this, but with great power comes great responsibility to be advising these advertisers of where they stick their money.   Now, we’re calling out the advertiser saying it’s lazy, but actually how many agencies for the past five years of being the agency for that brand has said ‘I still don’t think you should be putting your money there’.  None.  But they advise where their money is supposed to be – our job isn’t to spend the money, our job is to advise where best to spend the money.  Our job isn’t to find the easiest route, our job is to find the best route.    What will give you the consumers you want, what will give you the PR ability you want, and maybe if we can and (and this has only just been added to most agency’s rosters) ensure we reach our society and make the world a better place from the day we got here.  The last two have only just happened, let’s be honest, Brand Advance has been around for two and a half years and the amount of articles I keep reading now where this agency is now a diversity first agency, it’s like yeah I’m pretty sure that black people were always there so why are you a diversity first agency in 2020? (SS: true) Shouldn’t advertising as ground zero been diversity first? Did we just choose that we’re going to advertise to black people now, oh we’re going to advertise to gay people, or to people with a disability?   Shouldn’t we be advertising to everybody that’s a possible consumer for product A?

So I just wanted to add that, I know it’s a bit longwinded, I apologise.

Sonoo:  That’s good, because to all the brands that will love the word disruption, and we know all the brands do, listen to this great advice that Chris has just given you for free.  So thanks for that Chris.

I do have one last question for both of you, and this is one of those with many headed beasts, who decides what to save because obviously where does the responsibility for brand safety lie?  With publishers, journalists, agencies, advertisers but with that, and I’ll start with Lexie first, is who do you think the public is most comfortable with that kind of evaluation of where the judgement actually rests?  Is the pubic comfortable with a regulator like Impress for instance, or for that matter brands taking the responsibility or even platforms like Facebook and Google?  Who should be deciding that?

Lexie:  I think that’s the million dollar question of our time and when we talk about the amorphous who the public, Chris has brought up, there’s a sort of different intersections of the public and maybe it’s not just one decision made by all of us, let’s think about the different groups in society that may be better placed to speak of their experiences as part of that public decision making.  So for example, currently decisions are being made about what content pays, why a free market essentially by developers, technicians, agencies and who inputs to that categorisation you know that’s really opaque and what those indicators are that they put into those categorisations that’s fairly opaque.  So let’s open it up, let’s kind of open that Pandora’s box and have more transparency about those indicators, about those starting points … and particularly on matters that affect the public, particularly on matters that affect vulnerable groups, let’s make sure that they have a seat at the table when we’re having these public discussions and when the public decision making takes place, to ensure that that openness and transparency is also rewarded with this feedback, that comes from the people directly affected by these decisions.  So there are aspects about this that come from the bottom line being what’s lawful or not, and some of the practices that Chris describes are for me, personally having worked in the law, don’t sound all that lawful, but because we don’t know about them, because we don’t have that public conversation about them, or there’s more willingness now but we’re only just starting really, is the lawfulness element of that.

And then there’s the ethical element of that, so going forward it’s not just about whether or not a decision is lawful, it’s about whether it’s ethical, is that the best practice, is that the best we can do? And those decisions I think absolutely should be made on a public basis, do I want government or politicians making these, well you have to ask yourself whether one’s best placed to do that, do I want the free market making those decisions and consumers just treated as products in a line? No.

But we have to be able to come together to create spaces where we can at least open up that conversation and least be transparent about what’s going on and then, having had what’s probably complex and difficult public discussion then let’s start talking about the decision makers and the indicators in the long term.  Because ultimately you know I think the situation as it stands is not sustainable, we may end up in a really perverse arrangement where some parts of the internet are basically user-pays and those paywalls to social creative life exist, and then another part is just a market place essentially, feeding to the lowest common denominator.  And I think that’s not the online digital experience and social experience we want to end up in.

Sonoo:  Indeed, Chris last words from you.

Chris:  I can’t say it any better than Lexie said it.  I think for me, as she said, it starts with the wider public they have to have a seat at the table.  Do I want politicians making the decisions? No but I want them to be a layer after the open forum discussion to enforce the decisions and it needs an organisation like Impress that is then the last layer of ‘if you don’t do it then we will enforce the law on it’ because it’s a wild west out there, it seems to be the last frontier of literally the internet, with everybody doing what they think they can get away with, everybody is on it, you wouldn’t wish that place on your worst enemy, because it’s like the worst of the school playground with the worst things of the adult life mixed into one.    You know, that sort of horrible argument in a pub, that’s in there every day mixed in with the hidden horribleness of a playground, it really is.  I’ve got two teenagers and I worry when they are online, I worry when they are outside but I worry more when they are online and they are online a lot, whether it’s through their mobile or whatever.  It needs to be policed and then the way it will change is where the ad dollars go, and the only way the ad dollars are going to shift to places where it has been after we have got through who makes those decisions and I agree with an open forum at the beginning.   I don’t think it’s too open all the time because then a decision is never made, it’s consider everything from every demographic that is affected by this, which is basically the world, take in all of that and then make a considered decision back out to come to maybe come to a set of regulatory terms and then they are enforced.  There needs to be that sort of line in the sand, we’ve all decided this and now we’re going to go away and implement it.  And once we implement that, should you fall on the other side or fall off and break them regulations then this is going to be the consequences.   But at the moment, I don’t know if you agree, it seems like there is a lot of the first stage, everybody’s having a chat about how bad it is, but actually nobody’s took it to the stage of ok, this is how we’re going to fix it.  I suppose Impress is doing its bit, The Conscious Advertising Network we’re doing our bit, Facebook and Google would argue that they are doing their bit and there’s others like the Ozone are there for reasons of this, but actually it needs someone or a regulatory body to collate all this information – I’ve lost count of how many documents and reports I’ve read about how bad things are and what’s being funded, even down to recently the IAB has ads.txt and sellers that use them, but actually they found that the wrong ads.txt were on Russia Today and Breitbart so even these things that we’ve got in place for ad fraud and meant to let you know exactly where your ad’s going, even that’s being bent and broken and squeezed a little bit and manipulated.   So I don’t know whether is actually a government thing Lexie, just because I think they not showing themselves to do so well at some problems they’ve got already (laughs) so adding another one maybe isn’t just for government, cos no one government owns the internet.   America might say that they own it (SS: we can add China to that list) but if we’re honest wasn’t it a guy in Britain that built it

Sonoo: yes it was indeed, which is why the idea of us having a conversation and lending some thoughtful insights to this debate as well is a start, and as you both said it is a journey ahead of us, but to have voices like yours to add to these conversations, and indeed to call out the bits that need to be called out, I think we all need to be grateful for that.

So thank you so much to both my guests, Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, from Impress and Christopher Kenna from Brand Advance.  Thank you both for this very very interesting conversation. 

This is the Conscious Thinking Podcast from The Conscious Advertising Network. Thank you for listening.

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 and bye bye.