Rav Roberts, Global Head of Digital Governance at Diageo

My name is Rav Roberts. I work for Diageo, one of the largest alcohol producers globally. We have about 200 brands including Guinness, Johnny Walker, a number of single malts, Cerat, Tankeray, pretty much any spirits that you can think of. We also own about a third of Moet, Hennessy, so that's Moet and Chandon, Verveclé Co. and some other fabulous brands as well. We operate in about 180 countries. So my role is digital governance and compliance and that covers all of our digital marketing activities, whether that's paid, earned or owned. So paid as in paid media, owned as in our hundreds of websites, e-commerce sites that we have and earned in terms of the thousand, you know, quite a lot of social media pages. I've been in digital advertising marketing for a number of years. I started off probably in San Francisco, well I did start off in San Francisco, but probably in the year 2000 in the dot-com boom times where I had a digital marketing agency and times have changed a lot since then. But for me what is amazing is in all that time we didn't have, we basically only had self-regulation for Google, Facebook, Twitter, all of the big digital giants that we have. It was all self-regulation. That era is coming to an end. There's going to be substantial government regulation globally, whether that's in the UK, the US and other markets as well. China, India, Latin America. So my presentation focused on what I think is a pivot point, a turning point for digital marketers, for marketing in general and I think it's happening right now. Just going over the changes that I've seen. Of course back in the year 2000 we had the internet, but we didn't have social media. We had GeoCities, people probably can't remember that. That was a precursor to Facebook. Facebook started in 2004. Then we had the iPhone, the smartphone that came in in about 2008 and since then with the rising influence of Amazon, Google, Facebook, well social in general, there's been a massive shift to the digital marketing universe and very recently we've seen steps in regulation, whether that's the e-privacy directive for cookies, the GDPR that came into effect last year and then the big issues with ad fraud, brand safety. My presentation actually mentioned that a year, about two years ago when I was at a very, a World Federation of Advertisers meeting, a massive story broke about big brands funding terror online and that really meant that the ads that were being shown on platforms such as YouTube, a portion of that was going to terrorism. So following that a few months later Diageo had to pull, had to stop all of its YouTube advertising globally. So big changes are happening. There are huge differences but there are huge similarities as well. So with Diageo we all have a common purpose. We all know that we work for these fantastic brands and the consumers are at the heart of everything that we do. So we try and put their interests first and by doing that we put the interests of our brands first. Our brands are everything for us just as our consumers are and so we do everything we can to look after that and all of the partners that we work with, we formed a trusted marketplace with our media agencies. So we are very careful about who we work with. All of our marketers internally have to follow a Diageo marketing code, a digital code of practice as well and all of the agencies they work with have to do the same thing. So we do have a lot of controls in place but these controls change all the time. So we've had mandatory social influencer guidelines quite recently, you know about a year and a half ago that came into effect and because our social footprint and our digital footprint changes all the time, we need to keep on top of all of these activations and guide all of our marketers as well. Videos, it's always been a huge role for us whether that's TV, you know advertising, video advertising back in the 80s and 90s with Guinness, some really famous Guinness ads and more recently the advertising that we're doing on video globally. The three critical areas for us just as in all of our paid media spend is ad fraud, brand safety and viewability. So if we look at all of those in turn from an ad fraud point of view, are we sure that our marketing spend is actually going where it's supposed to go? Are we sure that it's not robots that are seeing our ads for example? From a brand safety point of view, are our ads being shown where they are supposed to be shown? And you know we don't want for example a drinking ad showing next to terrorist content for example or any other sort of nasty horrible content. Our brand's purpose is very much about celebrating life every day everywhere, so we want to make sure that we get that context right and in terms of viewability, how long is an ad shown before we actually have to pay for it? Can people actually see the ad or is it below the fold? So all of these these three aspects are critical for our video advertising. They're different measures of success so we use something called Moat which helps us with viewability, it's a software as a service platform, we implement these tags in all of our ads, our digital ads, so that's how we can see what the viewability is. We've also insisted through our trusted marketplace that we have white lists, negative keywords lists in place continually monitored so that helps increase return on investment for us. So that's a core, so taking into account responsible marketing the various age restrictions across the different countries we operate in is a critical piece of our marketing strategy. We have two main codes of conduct for marketers and they are the Diageo marketing code which very much focuses on that particular aspect where we can market how we can effectively ensure that we target adults in the different countries and we have intelligence inbuilt algorithms inbuilt to all of our marketing because we know that an adult isn't the same in different countries. In Sweden for example it's 21, in America it's 21, in the UK it's 18, in Canada I think it's 20. So all of that intelligence is built in, all of our media partners that we work with as part of the trusted marketplace have to agree, sign up to that code of conduct as well. What kind of role does video play in our own channels? We've got hundreds of websites globally, as you know we've got 200 brands we operate in 180 countries. Some of those websites are e-commerce sites as well. Video is a key communication vehicle on all of those sites so we absolutely use that to drive more effective engagement with the consumers and visitors that we have. We also try and create content that can go viral so we make that as effective as possible by using the right open graph tags for example to enable sharing on social media. We also ensure that all of the videos that we make, because it's content designed to be shared, have the right compliance requirements. For example a forward advice notice, a responsible drinking reminder, making sure that people know that they shouldn't be sharing this with underage people. So it's a core part of our strategy for our own content as well. We've just got memorable campaigns all the time, whether it's for Guinness, Smirnoff, Tankeret, Surup, you know you name it. But I think my favourite has to be, actually we had the White Walker one recently as well. But my favourite was probably the Jane Walker for Johnny Walker, where instead of the walking man we had a walking woman. And that really was very effective. Female empowerment in the Agio is one of our top strategic priorities so it was really good to see the Jane Walker and I was very happy to be part of a company that did that. The key takeaway for the audience today really is we're at this pivotal point in the history of the internet where everything that's happened before is going to be different to what's going to happen. There's going to be the age of self-regulation for social media and the other big companies is over. As well as that we've got artificial intelligence regulation that will be coming, automation regulation, all of these huge challenges are coming and the audience is going to have to be part of that otherwise it'll just happen to you without you being part of that.