Annual Review 2022: Working Together To Progress Our Industry

Stephen Woodford, Chief Executive, Advertising Association

As we draw to the end of 2022, we complete the final year of our current 3-year strategy – Responsibility, Trust & Growth – a strategy which saw us launch an updated mission, and for the first time, actively include the promotion of the social contribution that advertising can make to the UK. This brought about the creation of All In – our inclusion workstream and Ad Net Zero – our climate action workstream, as well as double-down on the work to rebuild public trust in advertising, respond to Brexit headwinds with renewed efforts to grow exports, boost media literacy amongst young people through Media Smart and maintain proactive relations with policymakers around many areas including HFSS advertising, digital and data regulation. Who knew though, back in January 2020, that we would shortly see the UK Government become the biggest advertiser or that advertising would play a critical role in saving lives by delivering key behaviour change messages to tackle the Covid pandemic?

Three years on and we are now publishing our new strategy for 2023-25 which sets out the big areas of focus for us to address as we approach the middle of the third decade of the 21st century. You can find out more about this strategy in this Annual Review.

This decade is proving to be one where big geo-political issues are coming to the fore, impacting us all and rightly asking big questions of our industry and the role we can play in tackling them. It is also a decade when the Advertising Association will reach its centenary in 2026 and, as we look forward, I reflect back to our organisation’s origins and ‘the betterment of advertising’ as defined by its founders in the 1920s.

With this in mind, we have renewed our mission for the Advertising Association. I want the association to be the best place for UK advertising’s key players to work together to strengthen and improve our industry. This reflects the energy, restlessness, and desire we consistently feel from all our members to move the industry forwards, address its challenges and weaknesses, to improve it and to act collectively, if that is where the best solution lies.

The Advertising Association exists to think about the health of advertising as a
whole, the complex, interconnected ecosystem on which the commercial success of all our members depends. We are here to address the challenges and make the most of the opportunities that our industry faces, by being the forum for discussion about future challenges and for collective action to address them.

As I look ahead, we must make positive progress on the big areas – those of
continuing to rebuild public trust in our work, addressing our industry’s talent
shortage and making our workplace more inclusive, of delivering the very best
climate action that we possibly can and assisting the UK’s transition to net zero, supporting jobs and delivering on our responsibilities to people, society, businesses and the economy.

Click here to download a copy of our full 2022 Annual Review.