Our mission: to tackle excessive frequency

Front Foot Chair and Marketing Director, Direct Line Group Mark Evans looks at how industry can tackle excessive frequency in advertising

Our Front Foot breakfast event later this month will bring our members from advertisers, agencies, media owners and tech companies together to discuss potential industry-wide solutions to address excessive frequency of advertising. Finding a solution is vital.  We know from the Credos research first shared at LEAD in January, that excessive frequency is a key factor in damaging public trust and favourability in advertising. You can read more about that in the Advertising Association’s new paper ‘Arresting The Decline Of Public Trust In UK Advertising’ which is available here.

But let’s be under no illusion that this will be an easy thing to fix. This recent article for WARC – The risks of over-exposure: how ad bombardment promotes consumer mistrust – looks at this challenge in more detail. Equally, this isn’t mission impossible. The best advertising provides a value exchange between a business and its target customer and we have been able to do this successfully for many decades.

Any solution will need to be a critical part in what is being called, by the President of the Advertising Association – Keith Weed, ‘a system change for our industry’. We need to find an answer that works for everyone – for the advertiser looking to serve the optimum number of ads, for the agencies providing services to enable this and for the media owners and tech platforms facilitating the delivery. Everybody has their own stake in this, but we all have a shared common goal – to make sure that our collective behaviour does not continue to abuse the public’s trust and cause our advertising to become nothing but noise that consumers actively switch off.

The members of Front Foot will be convening at the offices of Jellyfish in The Shard to work together in groups that represent all parts of the industry. Our goal is to raise, discuss and consider solutions that will answer the clarion call for a system change and work fairly for the interests of all the different business models involved.

To take part as a Front Foot member, please register your place with the event management team at AA@adassoc.org.uk

To discuss joining the Front Foot network, contact Nwora.Emenike@adassoc.org.uk in the Front Foot team.

The Front Foot breakfast takes place on Thursday, April 25, 8.30-10.00 at Jellyfish, The Shard, London.