After 10 years, I’ve decided to leave UM.
To say that this was a painful decision would be an understatement, but it was a decision I needed to make.
To be more accurate, it’s a decision to leave the large agency holding company model – a model that is rife with competing interests and conflicting loyalties, shackled to the industry status quo by “dysfunctional interdependencies.”
It is a model that can adequately serve neither the interests of advertisers nor their customers – and certainly not of shareholders, as the agencies beholden to this model conflict and commoditize themselves into obsolescence.
In a May op-ed, I explained that I love being part of this industry – one that shapes culture and builds brands, but also an industry at a critical inflection point, faced with bridging a massive trust gap. At the intersection of technology and society, agencies sit in a powerful position between the advertisers whose brands they are charged with stewarding and cultivating and the platforms that control the information economy.
I saw an immense opportunity to contribute to a more responsible future, driving toward new standards that contemplate the interests of all stakeholders, and the impacts on people, democracy and society.
Yet, as I wrote that piece in May, I grew frustrated with the realization that the past three pieces I’d written said substantively the same exact thing. While the risks continued to grow (e.g., a rising youth mental health crisis, widespread collection and sharing of sensitive health and location data in a post-Dobbs landscape), there had been no meaningful change in the industry.
Platform changes begot workarounds. Regulations codified loopholes. Brands invested in solutions with expiration dates. The trust deficit grew. Those most vocal about their focus on privacy, ethics, transparency and transformation were often the most desperate to sustain the status quo behind closed doors – lobbying against laws and standards that deliver against consumer expectations and advertiser interests, shrouding their practices in doublespeak.
The industry’s commitments to doing right by their customers appeared to be little more than theatrics, semantics and mental gymnastics.
I begrudgingly published my benign op-ed, only to later find out that it caused quite a stir. Where I thought I was reiterating the obvious, some saw an unwanted spotlight illuminating vulnerabilities and realities best left unseen.
I would again learn this lesson after speaking to The New York Times regarding the Adalytics report finding that YouTube appears to be serving targeted ads on “made for kids” content. I spoke in support of advertisers, saying that it shouldn’t be this hard to keep ads off of “made for kids” content. Most brands don’t want to be there. Parents don’t want them there. And kids stand to be subjected inadvertently to inappropriate tracking.
This, too, was controversial.
This industry appears absolutely determined to sleepwalk into an existential crisis, contorted by the whims and interests of monopolists that write the rules of the web, and powered by data that is often surreptitiously extracted and at times unscrupulously exploited. And while the industry stands to gain by evolving for the better, it is plagued by chronic short-termism, worsened by increasing financial pressure. The thought of accountability elicits scoffs.
In this context, to continue in my position would only contribute to the problem. It would fuel a false perception of progress that has not been realized and priorities that are not (or cannot be) upheld. I, for one, intend to be a change agent and transformation partner, not an actress. I realized I had no choice but to leave.
To be clear, this isn’t about some academic or esoteric plea to do better, divorced from commercial realities. This is about a tragic irony that, in an industry that exists to cultivate connections with consumers to drive growth for businesses, trust, respect and transparency are seen as optional – even radical. This is about incentive structures that are fundamentally flawed and operating models that are inherently conflicted. This is about the reality that the advertising industry refuses to acknowledge that, absent change, it is set on a course for self-assured destruction.
If consumers don’t trust brands and advertisers can’t trust their partners, sustainable growth is attainable for nobody. If we allow ourselves to take comfort in numbers or shrug our collective shoulders, accepting vanity metrics as measures of success, parroting back carefully crafted and opaque talking points fed to us by the platforms with the most power, stagnation is the most optimistic outcome.
As things stand today, the industry is incapable of overcoming these challenges without intervention in the form of regulation, independent research and oversight. The market dynamics are simply prohibitive to serving the interests of clients and their customers, and performance measures only incentivize turning a blind eye.
I call back to a question I’ve posed previously: In a connected world, with unchecked power concentrated in the hands of Big Tech, is choice for consumers or marketers much more than an illusion? Are people being asked a fair question?
We all know the answer.
So, while I am leaving my role, I’m not leaving the mission.
I’m leaving to emancipate myself from the shackles of inherent conflicts and chains of the status quo that pervade our collective progress. I am leaving to have the independence required to move the industry forward and for the freedom to use my voice. I’m leaving because this industry can’t survive if we don’t ask the hard questions – questions that we may not like the answers to, but without which we will not move forward.
I’m leaving not because I’m done, but because it’s time to get started.
“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
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