#73 - Amy Williams,CEO of Good Loop - How doing good and making a big bottom-line impact go perfectly hand-in-hand

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that boosts the return on investment of our advertising by turning every ad into an ethical one, and my guest is Amy Williams, Co-Founder and CEO of Good Loop.

Amy is an active member of the Women in Tech and Tech For Good communities. She was recently named by Forbes as one of the 30 Under 30 most influential people in media & marketing and has recently been listed in The Drum Digerati as one of the 100 outstanding individuals excelling in the UK digital industry.

Amy has worked in the advertising sector all her career. At the age of 15, she first stepped into an advertising agency. She cut her teeth at one of the world's largest advertising agencies, where she worked on everything from global TV ads to scrappy social campaigns. During this time, she realised that it’s really difficult for brands to get their message in front of their audience in a cost-effective and positive way.

The more she learned about the industry the more she started to see a disconnect between brands and the people they were trying to talk to. Too often, the transaction between advertiser and viewer is at best impersonal and at worst unpleasant. As ad blocker downloads continue to rise and quality journalism continues to suffer the consequences, she sensed that it was time for a more positive solution. That's why she founded the ethical video advertising platform, Good-Loop.

This inspired me, hence I invited Amy to my podcast. We explore what’s broken in the advertising industry and why current approaches to get the maximum number of eyeballs for the minimum possible cost will only make things worse, not better.

We dive into the concept behind Good-Loop, and how it’s found an ingenious way to connect people, brands and publishers in a more meaningful and, consequently, more effective way that’s creating a winning case for everyone involved.

Here are some of her quotes:

The big idea behind my business is that your time, your attention and your data, all of these things online, they are valuable to someone. They're valuable to advertisers.

And so, we want to basically harness that value and use it to make the world a better place.

The reason I called it Good Loop actually was, I was thinking about this idea of creating a virtuous cycle: Advertising is such a big business and it funds the free internet.

But it's something that people inherently resent. There's a huge erosion of public trust around advertising online.

It’s illustrated by how many people use ad-blockers. Hundreds of millions use ad blockers, and then it kind of leaves you the question: ‘How are we going to keep the internet free if we can't find a way for advertising to be perceived more positively?’

So, we're on a mission to make ethical advertising the new normal. And that means that whenever you see an ad online, it shouldn't be something you block, it should be something that you're pleased to see because it means that the world is being made a better place.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. Why, in order to create breakthrough innovation, it’s key to frame the problem in the correct way, i.e., name the true villain in your story.
2. How, by making your solution outcome-oriented, or in other words, only make customers pay for success, you can create an offer that’s a no-brainer for every stakeholder to get involved in.
3. Why, by simply starting, you will be 10 times further ahead than most people who just talk about an idea, but hope for all stars to align.