An ethical advertising platform that allows brands to spend media dollars and do good at the same time launches in America, reports Forbes.
With the debate raging around how brands can spend their advertising dollars in an ethical way, Good-Loop is well placed to capitalise.
It's an innovative platform that has so far raised over half a million pounds for charities by working with companies like Unilever, Nestle, Bose, H&M and Amazon Music, combining programmatic technology with the ability to do good in the world in line with their purpose.
Good-Loop will never force someone to engage with an ad. But if they choose to give an advertiser some of their valuable time, attention, and data, they get to give 50% of the advertisers' money to a relevant charitable cause.
They recently had a $1.6m fundraising round and the company is now poised to expand into the United States.
From her time working at a global advertising agency, Amy Williams noticed a disconnect between brands and the people they were trying to talk to. Regardless of how thoughtfully crafted the brand messaging is, more often than not, at the moment we actually experience an ad online, the transaction between advertiser and viewer is at best impersonal and at worst unpleasant - with ads popping up, exploiting our data and distracting us from the content we came to see.
Williams figured that this was crazy because the last thing a brand wants is to annoy us. Brands want to build meaningful relationships with their consumers. In fact, more and more brands are thinking about their 'purpose' and how they can have a positive impact on the issues that matter most to their consumers.
So, together with her cofounder, Daniel Winterstein, they launched Good-Loop back in 2016 as a way to connect people, brands and good causes in more meaningful, and consequently more effective ways. The objective was not only to make advertising more positive for people on the internet but also use the $300bn industry a force for good in the world.
Today, Good-Loop is an ethical advertising platform that treats viewers of online video adverts with respect and rewards their attention by donating 50% of the ad spend money to a chosen charity. Without going into the technical wizardry of this, the outcome is that if someone chooses to engage with an advertiser's content, they unlock a free donation, funded by the advertiser, and can choose which cause they’d like to give it to.
For example, Good-Loop ran a campaign with Domestos (one of Unilever's toilet cleaning brands) and every ad engagement funded Unicef's global work to put clean toilets into schools. They also ran a campaign with Unilever's ethically sourced beauty range, Love Beauty & Planet, supporting vegan and sustainability charities to reinforce the products' hard-earned sustainable credentials. Bose, chose to work with Good-Loop as a direct response to the COVID-19 crisis, supporting Save The Children at a time when their services are desperately needed.
With brands pulling spend from news publishers, Good-Loop is also creating new opportunities for brands to support journalism. Williams says that "There has never been a more important time for brands to fund quality journalism. From global pandemics to Black Lives Matter protests, unfortunately, a lot of the news that matter most right now is fairly negative. Which means that brands, understandably, put those words on their blocklists. The Guardian, for example, is seeing massive peaks in its live blog traffic as people are flocking to trusted new sites to educate themselves, but they are struggling to monetise this traffic because brands won't touch a COIVD story."
Good-Loop have developed several solutions to counter this problem, most notably, their ethical ad formats enabling brands to appear next to 'bad' news in a sensitive way. Imagine if every time you saw an ad on a Black Lives Matter article, you could donate that advertisers' money to The Bail Project or Campaign Zero. Not only would that journalist be supported but you'd also be able to contribute in a small, positive way, in partnerships with that brand.
"That's a pretty powerful moment for a brand and a consumer to share and that's going to ultimately drive value for the advertiser."