-In the next decade the world will change more than it has done in the past 50 years
-Climate change has become a climate crisis and could become a climate meltdown, economic power is shifting from the West to the East and there is political instability at home and abroad
-I believe using data effectively and at scale will be critical to our ability to overcome these challenges
-But data has become a dirty word, people are concerned about security, exploitation and surveillance
-I have always seen data as a force for good
-Beyond my world of advertising, data has driven leaps forward in education, science and healthcare
-There isn’t as day that goes by when I do not talk about how we can use data to improve the effectiveness of advertising
-But the recent press coverage has made me question myself
-Am I a bad person?
-And it’s this point that concerns me the most “surveillance”
-The idea that the work I do might be intruding on someone’s privacy is completely counter to everything I believe in
-I have always seen data as a force for good
-Beyond my world of advertising, data has driven leaps forward in education, science and healthcare
-There isn’t as day that goes by when I do not talk about how we can use data to improve the effectiveness of advertising
-But the recent press coverage has made me question myself
-Am I a bad person?
-But the purpose of big data is not surveillance
-Surveillance is, “The careful watching of a person or place”
-This isn’t what we do, what we do is aggregate information to find common themes
-And doing that makes what we do anonymous
-Whilst “surveillance” might be the word of the moment it is not what big data is about
-What is true is that data has been used to exploit
-But every commodity - and data is a commodity - can be used to harm if it falls into the wrong hands
-The issue isn’t data, the issue is people who see opportunity to exploit data for unethical reasons
-And there is no doubt that data itself has been far from a force for good in some cases
-Cambridge Analytica did exploit people’s data to influence the presidential election and EU referendum
-But people exploiting new mediums for political gain is nothing new
-The invention of the industrial printing press (and therefore the newspaper), helped to create the French Revolution
-The Nazi’s exploited radio to spread their message of evil
-And TV smear campaigns have been used by every Presidential candidate in the past 50 years
-What can we do to stop people exploiting data, so that we can rebuild people’s confidence and use it as a force for good?
-If we want data to be a force for good we must all live by four principles
-Be clear
-Be secure
-Be helpful
-Be honest
-Be clear
-Make sure your audience knows what you’re collecting and how it will be used
-This means no legal jargon, in plain English this is what we’re collecting and this is how we will use it
-Be secure
-Ensure data security runs through your organisation
-Data breaches typically occur because someone in an organisation does not follow a process intended to protect people’s data
-Make sure from day one all of your employees know the importance of data security
-Be helpful
-Use data to aid not obstruct
-My personal bug-bear in advertising is the use of data to serve people ads that annoy them
-Data should be about serving ads that are relevant and beneficial to the consumer
-Helpful ads are successful ads
-Be honest
-Use messaging that resonates but doesn’t mislead
-Data allows us to be relevant in our messaging, but, as shown by Cambridge Analytica, it can also be used to prey on people’s fears and mislead them
-Great ads are those that resonate, that make an impact, but that do not mislead
-The key to these principles is that we all need to make a concerted effort to change
-Moving to clearer, more secure, more helpful and more honest data practices can’t be cat and mouse, it has to be done in unison
-If we move together we can win back people’s confidence in data and we can help it be a force for good
-We can’t let people like Alexander Nix, Steve Bannon and Dominic Cummings define what data means to the public
-I hope in ten years time, as we look back on this decade, we’re opening our seminar with stories of people are living longer because of data, how education levels across the world are higher because of data and how data helped us to face and solve the climate crisis