We caught up with Amy Williams, Founder of Good-Loop, to talk about where the idea of Good-Loop came from to the active campaigns Good-Loop are running …
Where did the idea of Good-Loop come from?
Put frankly – people hate ads. People block ads if they can and resent them if they can’t – which is pretty understandable when you consider how annoying and intrusive online advertising has become! But advertising funds for the free internet. This means that now, more than ever, it plays a crucial and unavoidable role in our society, so Good-Loop’s founders are passionate about examining, understanding and fixing this broken value exchange.
As co-founders, both myself and Daniel approached this challenge from a different perspective. I was working at a global advertising agency, seeing first hand how many brands were talking about ‘purpose’ and ‘social impact’ with no way to translate these words into action. Daniel was running a software consultancy, after completing his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University, and felt frustrated by how intrusive cookie-based ad targeting was. Daniel and I met online and were immediately united by a desire to make doing good the new normal in advertising. To create an ecosystem whereby respect and transparency is a default, not an outlier, and whereby advertising makes a meaningful and positive contribution to society.
Formed in 2016, Good-Loop is an ethical online advertising platform, created to meet the urgent need for more ethical, transparent and effective online advertising. Our technology creates & distributes ‘ethical ad formats’ onto premium websites and social platforms, globally. Once someone chooses to engage with the advert (it’s always a choice, we’re never annoying or intrusive!), they then unlock a free donation, funded by the advertiser, and can choose which cause they would like to support
What makes Good-Loop unique?
Good-Loop is entirely unique in the advertising industry in that we are the first and only technology offering that puts ethics and positivity at the heart of what we do. In an industry mired in negativity, where public trust has declined by 50% in the last 10 years – our ethical approach is a valuable USP.
Good-Loop is the only advertising technology company in the world to achieve B-Corporation status. We donate 50% of the revenue from every single ad to charities around the world. We never use people’s data without permission and we never force someone to engage. This ethical USP also means that we deliver significantly better ROI for our customers. For example, Cocoa-Cola recently achieved a 40% uplift in ad recall when working with Good-Loop and Nestle saw a 20% increase in intent to purchase. These results explain our exciting commercial traction over the past 3.5 years, as we now work with major global brands, in 12 markets, running over 100m ads every month.
Not only is the philosophy and business model extremely disruptive, but we also have cutting edge technology under the hood. We have built a portal which enables the team to build & deploy ethical ad campaigns at scale, with integrations into real-time global advertising exchanges, AI to optimise the buying, proprietary social listening & targeting tools, ethical data capture as well as a results & impact reporting dashboard for our clients.
Ultimately, we are first-to-market and our unique ‘ethics plus effectiveness’ proposition is tapping into the exciting purpose industry zeitgeist, at scale.
What have you learnt?
As a business, we’ve learned the art of carefully balancing purpose and profit. The charitable donations we make form a central part of the company’s USP – it’s the key reason why users choose to engage with our ads, which means it’s also a key reason why we can deliver such brilliant results to our customers.
But ultimately our customers work with us because we can shift the needle on their key commercial objectives – be it increasing purchase intent, building brand love or driving advocay and loyalty – these are the metrics that matter to global brands. So there is a subtle but crucial distinction between the reason why we care and the reason why our customers care and we’ve had to learn how to bake our ethical principles into a clear and compelling articulation of the commercial benefits.
What are the plans for Good-Loop in the future?
Good-Loop is now running active campaigns in multiple markets across Europe and LATAM and earlier in 2020 we launched into the US, which is an exciting, high-potential market for us. We’re currently focused on driving growth through valuable thought leadership, as we help our customer to navigate the ethical quagmire of COIVD, Black Lives Matter, the Facebook Boycott and various other recent events that have been an exciting catalyst for brand purpose and positive impact.
