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• Andy Burnham's speech to the Internet Advertising Bureau at the Mermaid Centre, London.

Andy Burnham's speech to the Internet Advertising Bureau at the Mermaid Centre, London.

In the global marketplace, our ability to be innovative and creative is central to the British economy of the future and those skills are where we’re really strong in this country. Particularly in advertising. It’s why you have been so successful.

It’s also very welcome to see the level of responsibility being shown too. In looking to diversify the range of young talent coming into the industry, and in lending your skills to social marketing – as a participant in the Change4Life campaign just launched earlier this week.

I would like you all to know that I usually spend a large part of my weekend personally carrying out extensive first hand research on the online industry – looking at websites, such as Nick Jnr, Club Penguin and addictinggames.com

My re-education is in full swing.

I asked my eldest, who’s 8, if we had to get rid of the either the TV or the computer, which would he keep.

Computer. No hesitation.

It’s a simple question. But it throws up a whole range of issues from under the surface for politicians, for citizens, for consumers. For society as a whole.

And its one which reflects a fundamental change in how we access information and entertainment.

As Tanya Byron found in her report on Safer Children in a Digital World, as a society we need to be thinking about the core values we have about risk and behaviour both offline and online. The mechanisms we use to apply those values may be different in some cases, but the values are the same.

When children play outside they have things to guide them - we have pelican crossings and play bark at the playground. When they watch TV, we have a watershed which helps parents navigate for them. When they go online, suddenly they can be in a world without checks and balances and borders.

Stakes in the ground which allow people to be guided about what is accessible and acceptable – these stakes are not yet there in the on-line world as they are in the old world.

There’s a funny, but troubling quote in the Byron report from a nine-year old boy

‘I’m worried I’ll get lost on the internet and find I’ve suddenly got a job in the army or something.’

That raises questions about media literacy, the level of protection and the level of media education we have in place.

The Government is moving away from the thinking that the online world is completely ungovernable, and I know you as an industry are a long way from the internet pioneers’ vision of a world without frontiers.

We’re a long way from the John Perry Barlow Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996, where he declares

‘the global space we are building to be naturally independent  of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us.’

It has been hard to challenge some of these early seeds but we are now at the start of a different debate, beginning to question what is the right level of intervention? And you shouldn’t read into this that I mean Government intervention - I’m thinking first of that from the industry itself.

And it’s right to do that now the internet is mainstream. There is still a debate to be had around reconciling the sense of liberation people get from the internet, and the sense of unease they feel about it. Unease that comes from not having the same sense of bearings, the familiar anchors of the offline world.

One of the fundamentals of the debate is recognising that the internet wouldn’t exist in anything like the way it does without advertising.

Advertising is a creative industry in its own right. The business models of other creative industries are dependent on advertising. Oceans of creative content available online are supported by the advertising model.

So far that has been an enormously successful business model – with total online adspend going from insignificant only eight years ago to one billion in 2005 and nearly £4 billion next year – when it’s projected to exceed total adsales on TV.

That is a phenomenal pace of change.

For our part, Government is committed to making sure the UK is at the forefront of the digital age. We launched the Creative Britain strategy earlier this year with our commitments to making sure we remain a world leader in the creative industries.

And by early next year we will have pulled together from across Government our Digital Britain action plan, led by Lord Carter, to secure the UK’s place at the forefront of innovation, investment and quality in all related digital and comms industries. Industries which are now at the mainstream of the economy and will provide the jobs of the future.

The global credit crunch and the fall out from it make it even more important for the Government that we look to make sure we nurture those parts of the economy, like advertising, where we have talent and strengths and the potential for growth to compensate for what we are losing in other areas like financial services.

You’ll see the scale of our ambition with the plans for C&binet – the international creativity and business conference that will be launching next year to help ensure that our creative industries continue to grow and thrive.

The idea in time is that this unique international forum becomes the Davos for creative businesses, and I’m delighted that we have Chris Clarke of Nitro and Laurence Green from Fallon on board as C&binet ambassadors, helping set the agenda for the first forum next October.

That then is the bedrock of support from this Government that I want to keep front-of-mind while we look at the points of balance that I see coming up – the sources of people’s unease feel online – one of which is around advertising.

It’s right that we should be concerned particularly about children’s vulnerability. And I do believe that there is some content which is simply unacceptable.

I know Byron found only a small amount of evidence on the issue. Some which said young people are very good at ignoring adverts. But other evidence that said children are confused by the blurring of advertising and content.

Television is still the source of most complaints about advertising, but internet advertising, as of last year, is now second – with more complaints than the national press for the first time.

The balance the Government is looking for on this is advertising that benefits industry, which informs, even entertains the public, and which does not harm to consumers.

We already have regulation in place to that effect.

But the rising ASA figures and the measured remarks of Tanya Byron tell us that there is more we can do – a range of options and not necessarily state regulation – to make the online world a better balance of risk and benefit.

I welcome the IAB’s involvement with the Committee for Advertising Practice, with the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, and the IASH Code. And the work you are doing on privacy is very welcome – I look forward to seeing your guidelines shortly.

Personally I can see the consumer benefit of targeting advertising – the equivalents of the Genius button on itunes and Amazon’s various recommendations. I can see the benefits of fewer adverts of greater relevance.

But there has to be informed consent for a system on that basis. There has to be an opt-in to the targeting technology, not an opt-out.

And we need to resolve the balance over personal data. What’s necessary for privacy and data protection? What’s beneficial for security? What’s acceptable for marketing? These are all questions we need to consider jointly.

There has to be responsibility when it comes to online promotion and advertising of alcohol and food to children – responsibility to upholding the principles that apply offline, not trying to circumvent them online.

There has to be transparency. Offline, people are accustomed to what advertising looks like. But the lines between advertising and editorial are blurred online – particularly when it comes to company and brand websites.

We also need to think, with online advertising overtaking TV advertising, how the online world can support content production, particularly in the UK.

This is all fast-moving territory at the moment, but I think it’s vitally important that the Government is ahead of the debate rather than sitting back then having to leap when a crisis comes along and brings huge pressure to bear – the sort of situation that risks cumbersome and unenforceable legislation.

We have to be interested in working together on practical, flexible, responsive measures.

We need a better dialogue between Governments at international levels on these issues. It is in this context that solutions can be found.

Above all we look to the industry to act responsibly, in its own interests. And you’ll have the full support of the Government.

ENDS

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