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Link: Redesigning the business of advertising – Cindy Gallop

This talk is full of gems. It’s nearly ten years old, but it all still rings true today:

If you align your strategies to what everyone else is doing, be sure a single business bullet will take you all down.

I get a lot of people coming to me for mid-life crises, career crises, business ventures, startups, and I always ask them to do the same two things. And, interestingly, these two things are the same whether you’re a person who’s lost their way or a business who’s lost their way:

  1. Identify what it is that you absolutely love doing, that you’re passionate about
  2. Identify the conditions under which you most love doing it

I believe the future of business is about doing good and making money simultaneously. And not in the old world order way that most companies currently do it which goes: we make money ‘here’ and then we do good by writing cheques to causes to clear our conscience over ‘here’. But the new world order way that we make money because we do good.

The vast majority of purchasers in every product sector are women. The vast majority of influencers of purchasers in every product sector are women. Women form the majority of users of social media. These days, women are the majority of gamers. Women are the majority of people who express themselves as digital personas online.

The majority of people creating the advertising communication that targets those women are men. In the US, only 3% of all advertising agency creative directors are female – 97% are male. The majority of people deciding whether that communications and advertising are the gold standard of creativity and effectiveness in our industry are men.

Women challenge the status quo because we are never it.