Elizabeth Fagan CBE, ISBA President and ex-Non Executive chairman of Boots kick started the ISBA Annual Conference 2020 with the following speech.
Welcome everyone to the ISBA Annual Conference 2020. It’s great to see so many ISBA members, industry partners and friends here today. The importance of all of us taking the time to come together cannot be underestimated.
I truly believe ISBA has never been more relevant and advertisers’ membership of ISBA never more essential. The challenges we are facing and the volatility of the world in which we are operating are unprecedented.
In 2002 I was on the ISBA Council and part of the working group who worked with the Competition Commission, the precursor to today’s CMA, to ensure fair and balanced trading after the merger of Granada TV with the rest of the ITV network.
The outcome was the introduction of Contract Rights Renewal or CRR and ISBA’s role in establishing this trading mechanism, ensuring advertisers views were expressed and understood, was fundamental. However, what really made it possible was the fact that the industry came together to solve the problem.
The landscape in 2002 was challenging but today we face a significantly more complex and challenging landscape that brings many more issues that need to be addressed. If ever there was a time for advertisers to come together and shape the future from the inside, that time is now.
In December last year, as I have done for the past two and a half years of my presidency, I spent time with our Council and Executive Committee. These are CMOs who oversee the UKs most important, influential and best-known brands. As members of ISBA we worked with Phil Smith and his team to identify the issues we needed to tackle over the next 12 to 18 months. The priorities we agreed are ambitious, but I am positive they will be achieved by the members and the ISBA executive working together with our industry partners.
Firstly, we have committed to lead our members in creating an advertising environment that delivers positive social and economic impact. We will continue to tackle the thorny issues of platform regulation, online harms, public trust and the legal and ethical use of data.
We will champion media, agency and digital supply chain relationships that deliver value for advertisers. Key to us achieving this are ongoing projects including Origin, our cross-media measurement programme, our involvement in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, GARM and our ground-breaking programmatic supply chain study. You will hear more about these projects throughout the day.
And we will work with our community of members and with partners to deliver thought leadership, learning, advice and guidance. Our newly launched partnership programme will provide us with even more exclusive content for our members.
And finally, we set ourselves Our Big, Hairy Audacious Goal: To be the first to launch a global prototype for cross media measurement in 2021, backed by advertisers, agencies, media and platform.
Phil will talk in detail in his speech about some of these projects and how we are working with our members to be the architects of change rather than having change forced upon us.
So, there is much to do, but we must consider the backdrop we are operating against if we are to truly appreciate the scale of the challenge ahead of us.
Last year the AA Trust research laid bare the reality. Our customers have lost faith in what we are telling them, they view advertisers as less trustworthy than politicians, bankers and estate agents. While we have been focused on how we reach an ever more fragmented audience in ever more innovative ways our customers have felt bombarded, disinterested, cynical and at the most extreme stalked by our advertising.
Over the last year advertisers have had to face the uncomfortable truth that the current advertising models and practices might not be the right ones for the future ahead.
We are at a critical point, the choices we make now will decide the future of the industry for years to come. It’s time for a reset and a rethink about what is the right model to take us forward. As I said earlier, there are many challenges facing our industry and if you want to operate in an open, transparent and flexible advertising eco-system, one where self-regulation is maintained, we the advertisers will need to be engaged and involved in shaping that eco-system. As I said in the summer, I believe that ISBA has never been more relevant and there has never been a more important time for us to come together with one voice. Let’s work together to ensure our voice is clear, concise, pragmatic, collaborative, informed and most of all heard.
ISBA and our members know it cannot work in isolation to shape the future of the advertising eco-system and nor would it want to. If we are to rebuild trust in our work and our industry, everyone in this room has a part to play. And that’s why this conference is so important. It allows us to face up to the challenges ahead together, discuss how we can tackle them and be honest that we may have made mistakes. I hope you enjoy the day ahead.