Annual Review 2021: Building Back Better… Together

By Stephen Woodford, Chief Executive, Advertising Association

The Advertising Association exists to bring our industry together, find consensus and positive responses to the challenges we face, act as a catalyst and collaborative forum to create new opportunities and manage programmes to improve advertising.

The ongoing brief for our team is to work with our members to drive the industry forward to a better place, now during genuinely extraordinary and challenging times. If the start of the 2020 pandemic was a rollercoaster in and out of a series of lockdowns, then 2021 saw a gradual but steady return to a new way of working, with new ambitions and actions to make good on the desire felt by all to build back better.

We replaced our annual LEAD conference at the opening of the year with RESET, our first conference as a tripartite with the IPA and ISBA. Taking place during lockdown, over 600 people joined the event online – from home offices and kitchen tables – to hear from advertising and political leaders on how the industry can build back better into a new decade. This trend of online events and online working continued for much of the first half of the year as the circumstances of the pandemic kept colleagues physically apart, but very much together online. Their energy fuelled countless working groups on the most important workstreams for our industry, namely Public Trust, Inclusion, Climate Action, Exports, and maintaining the self-regulatory system for advertising in the face of numerous regulatory issues and reviews.

Fast-forward to autumn, with two hybrid events successfully under our belt, we were back in Westminster. Our long-delayed Parliamentary Reception finally took place with 100 parliamentarians and ad industry leaders coming together in a fantastic showcase of our sustainability programme, Ad Net Zero. And from there, we headed to Glasgow to run the Ad Net Zero Global Summit from the STV studios directly across the River Clyde from the site of COP26. This time round, our ambition was to bring not just the UK industry together but our international colleagues too. I’m very proud we created a moment for more than 2,000 colleagues from over 60 countries to consider advertising’s role in tackling climate change.

As I look to 2022, my goal is for the Advertising Association to make its position as the place for the industry to convene even more real. This year, we have shared space, thanks to our members at ISBA, then moved to a co-working space in Holborn, which reinforced the need for a space for us to work together as a team and that allows our members to come together too. This has inspired us to make a move to our own office once more – finding a new home in Berners Street in the heart of Fitzrovia.

If the coronavirus pandemic has taught me anything, it is that we must seize every opportunity to work together: as a team, as a membership organisation and as an industry with other industries with similar interests, along with Government and the civil service.

We are clear about what we need to do to build back better. We can achieve much working remotely, that has already been proven, but we can go much further working together in shared spaces too. We want the new Advertising Association offices to become a vibrant hub for our industry, a place where members can come, connect and help drive progress on the big issues forward.

Our industry is at its best, at its most creative and entrepreneurial when we come together and collaborate. I am determined to show this through the work of the Advertising Association in 2022 and use the opportunities we can create to help our industry connect once again in real life, whether that is in the office, at industry events or in those social opportunities which make advertising such a vibrant and stimulating place to work in.

We have a huge responsibility in delivering on the economic and societal ambitions of our industry to help build back better. I am completely confident that we will do it best by being together.

Click here to download a copy of our full 2021 Annual Review.