Advertising is an invisible career. Celebrate the businesses getting it right and the rest will follow. And represent the society you sell to, or lose it.

Our mission is to make the case for responsible advertising, whether that is talking to government or making the public aware of the work we do to keep the industry trusted, inclusive and sustainable. We have programmes attached to all of those. Probably most important is the contribution to the UK economy and to job creation. I think 18% of the jobs in London alone are in marketing and advertising. It is almost an invisible career. It is never talked about in school, people do not grow up saying they want to work in advertising, so the benefits of it to the country and to people are little known.

When I talk to leaders, policymakers or the public, it is social impact that lands. Think back to the best campaigns and they are the ones that made us laugh or cry, the fantastic Christmas campaigns, and the ones loaded with social impact for charities or raising awareness of really significant issues. That is the work people hold on to.

The industry is almost unrecognisable. It changes shape all the time, and because of our stakeholders we represent literally every part of it, so we change shape at that pace too. Seven years ago we launched the digital transformation report, which became a government go-to read, covering 25 years of change. Then look at the seven years since: the innovation around AI, and post-pandemic, the way that changed every business globally. Keeping pace with it is what we do constantly.

We have a media partnership with the Times, and over the next 12 months we are publishing a case study every month where advertising has genuinely grown a business and had social impact, created jobs in a region. Currys was the first, with a campaign that won the Channel 4 Diversity in Advertising Award, having transformed the business to be more accessible for people with disabilities. The most recent is a cheese, the Sussex Charmer, so we are showing both ends of the spectrum, from a household name to a game-changing transformation for a small independent. We do the same internationally. We punch well above our weight for the size of our country, our exports are huge, we attract talent from all over the world, and the programme we run in Cannes is with the Department for Business and Trade, because advertising sits between professional services and the creative industries. Wherever there is a global stage, Cannes, South by Southwest in Austin, Dubai Expo, we take the platform.

Responsibility is becoming a must-have, but let us face it, this is competitive. With the global economic climate everyone is trying to take market share and hold it, and that is the whole point of advertising, selling things and growing a business. Alongside that, increasing numbers of businesses recognise the business case for being more responsible, whether that is being loud about sustainability or about representation and diversity work. The businesses doubling down are seeing a greater return, so I expect more of it.

Tesco is one of the biggest supermarkets in a space that could not be more competitive, and they have doubled down on inclusion. They have just won an industry award for the diversity work on their latest campaign and it has had a massive impact on the business. The recipe cards are now all in braille. In the ad, all of the talent have disabilities, cooking from those cards with inclusive gadgets and utensils. It is inclusive by design, so we all benefit from it, and they are shouting loud and proud about what they are doing for communities that need more help.

There is measurement for each area. On sustainability we set up Ad Net Zero, launched in 2020 at COP26, which is about the ad industry getting its own house in order and measuring the carbon emissions from the work we create so we can reduce them. Alongside it we have AdGreen, a calculator for production, so a shoot and everything attached to it, the people, the travel, gets loaded in. That has tangible impact on how people work now compared with 5 or 10 years ago, and it is increasingly a focus.

Around 2019 and 2020 there was a lot of noise from businesses trying to do the right thing and missing the mark. It was evident that the people making those ads, and placing them, were not from the relevant lived experience. The first stop was that we did not know who works in the industry. There was plenty of anecdote about recruiting more diversely, but no read. So we built the census. We launched it a year after the pandemic began, three lockdowns in, and ran the survey during a lockdown. We created a stop the clock moment, got everybody to take part, and had over 18,000 responses in a day. It gave us a phenomenal read of who works in advertising, how we identify and, most importantly, how we feel about where we work.

We run it every two years and the fourth iteration is next March. What matters is the action plan baked into the work, and around 160 UK businesses have adopted it. There are eight actions at the moment, ranging from supporting Asian talent and Black talent to people with disabilities and older people in the industry. The submission process is robust. You do not just get gifted the badge, you have to submit what you are doing, and it is challenged every year to make sure you are still doing it.

Fundamentally, we have to authentically represent the society we serve. That is number one. If people do not see themselves represented, they are not going to go for that brand. There are industry standards and awards that recognise the good work now, like Media For All, and they look at every part of the supply chain, down to media planning and buying. As a creative industry we love awards, we are in Cannes celebrating the work, and we have found as a trade association that giving people a forum to be celebrated works far better than beating them with a stick.

One of the best examples was the guide we introduced for Asian talent under the banner of be curious: finding out more about colleagues from different religious and cultural backgrounds, understanding which times of year are meaningful to them. As part of it we introduced a holiday swap, so if you do not celebrate Christmas you can swap that day for traditional holidays in your own culture. What businesses told us afterwards was that everybody else jumped in too, saying they do not much like Christmas, or they live alone, and would rather have the day back. That is inclusive design. The best ideas benefit everybody.

Trust is probably our biggest pillar of work. We were founded 100 years ago by two other trade associations, ISBA and the IPA, the bodies for brands and for agencies, to demonstrate to UK government that we are a trusted industry. We measure and track public sentiment towards advertising and have done for years, so we can cut it by demographic, see who is less trusting and tailor our communications. Interestingly, there is work to do with the people who work in the industry, the younger people in it. In the last All In census we asked whether they thought it was a trustworthy industry, and a majority said no. That is useful, because it is something we can target instead of focusing all the time on the outside in.

It is probably slightly generational, though it differs by sector and by role, and I think it is a seniority thing too. Our board, council and forums are incredibly senior people, that is the business leadership, and they know the work. So it is a communications job. We all have a responsibility to cascade the brilliant work the industry does on lots of different issues to our wider workforce. The knock-on impact would be so great in attracting talent and in changing perceptions outside the industry, including among politicians and policymakers. It is crucial, particularly at a time of really big change.

We are pre-competition. Every council meeting, where all the trade bodies sit, starts with a compliance statement saying this is not about competition. It sounds very grand, it sounds quite Hogwarts. Then we create forums to talk about one single subject and hold that space. Recently we asked everyone around the table what responsible advertising means to them, and it was fascinating to hear how differently it lands from business to business. That helps us distil what is coming and stay at the pace of the industry. One single point of conversation, and two hours on it, has worked really well.

On technology we want to be forward-facing. We have done training internally, we are 34 people, and we work with the big tech companies in our membership to stay across best practice, which is where some of that training came from. We run Adland Tours, getting MPs and civil servants in for a behind the curtain look at the industry to bust some myths, and we make sure they see businesses at the leading edge of innovation. We have just published a report on AI best practice across the industry. That is our role, to be the conduit to all of it.

I have worked in much more commercial environments than this one, and we are a not-for-profit, so this is the least commercial place I have worked. The job is making sure we can fund the activity we deliver on behalf of the rest of the industry. That is baked into member value: they know we can convene very senior people across the whole industry, which is exactly what we are doing here. We do not have hundreds of members, we have the leading stakeholders, and retention is very high. Since the pandemic and the economic crash a year after it, we have tried to do right by our membership, supporting the businesses having a tougher time and riding the storm with them. They are all still here.

Partnership is the word. Anyone who expects us just to deliver, I cannot think of an example where that has worked mutually. We have our council, and then Front Foot, a wider network of about 100 to 110 businesses: media and creative agencies, brands, key media owners and tech companies. We describe them as the turbocharger of our key work streams. They are the people who care about the industry beyond their day job. They might be running a media agency, but they see beyond it, and they give their time and services in kind, putting strategists on things or creating a campaign for something we need to shout about. It is less about serving them and more about collaborating to drive the most impact.

The longest-running challenge is people, alongside growth and the economy. Hybrid and flexible working brought a lot of positive change, but there is a balance and there are cons. Younger people coming in have never worked in an office environment and do not know the wider industry, so they are not learning by osmosis anymore, they learn from whatever is put in front of them. Those of us who are more senior have to remember we did not come up that way, and we cannot be complacent about managing differently. Springpod is part of the answer. It is a virtual work experience simulation, two pilots so far, one in a creative agency and one on the sell side with Bauer Media, for people as young as 13, though it works just as well for post-grads, students and people switching from other industries. The All In census showed us we had a retention problem: we attracted amazing talent, but we had a problem keeping a lot of it, and this helps with career readiness. We also run in-person work experience with a school in Canterbury every summer, and those young people have never come into London alone and have no family network here. They are always shocked at how informal we are, because they have been told work means a suit and zero personality. They come back talking about the treats in the office. We should be telling that story much more widely.

Longevity shaped how I lead as much as any job title did. I hope I am still a sponge, learning from the people I meet every day. Communication is key, and that is one of the downsides of working alone so much of the time. AI is probably the solution there and we are already seeing it in our workplace. The other thing is intuition. I have always worked in sales, and pure sales has a terrible reputation, but what people who are scared of it or dismissive of it miss is that it is relationship work at its core, and you have to be intuitive to be good at it. Looking forward, there is innovation all around us in tech, creative and people. The one thing I would love is a bit more fun back in the day job. It used to be so much fun, and we worked hard, all night on pitches. What I hear from everybody now is the overwhelm.