My name is Chris Bryant. I’m the Minister for lots of things. And Peter Mandelson, when I was first elected back in 2001 as the Member of Parliament for the Rhondda, I asked him for some advice. And he said he had lots of pieces of advice, but one of them was: “Never go to the same event two years in a row.” Because it means if you don’t go to the third year, everybody will condemn you for being a complete lazy so and so. But this is my second year in a row at this event. So I’ve broken Peter Mandelson’s advice.
And the second piece of advice he gave me was: “The one word you can never use in advertising and in politics is the word trust.” Because the moment you start talking about trust in politics, people start thinking: “Oh, can I trust you?” And they nearly always come to the conclusion that they can’t.
But in the end, advertising, I suppose, is fundamentally about trust. It’s about trying to persuade the public that you can trust a particular product or that you can trust a particular brand that is promoting a particular product, or that you can trust the person who is promoting the brand that is promoting the product, or that you can trust the space in which you’re watching or seeing this particular piece of advertising.
Of course, to enable trust in all and to create great advertising, that requires all sorts of different things. First of all, imagination. And I think sometimes when I speak to some other parts of the creative industries, they think of advertising as the kind of workhorses of the creative industries. But I actually think that in many regards, you’re more imaginative than nearly all the other parts of creative industries put together. And sometimes, of course, you have to bring them all together.
But the original idea for how to launch a product, or how to sell a product, how to promote it, how to keep it in the public mind, or how to completely change a view of a product or a brand, that’s a phenomenally imaginative process.
I always think to myself: “How do you come up with a television or a cinema advert for perfume?” How on earth can you give the impression that this is a perfume that somebody would want to wear when you cannot smell it? Which is fundamentally what perfume is all about. And of course, you do that in advertising with so many different products. Sometimes you’re trying to encourage people to try products that they would never have touched before, either because they’re brand new products, or because they’re something that has never come into their way of life before or because their life has changed.
That requires phenomenal imagination, but it also requires craft, serious craft, whether that’s using statistics and market analysis to be able to determine what is really going to work, how big a particular market is, or it’s that whole ecosystem of the whole of the creative industries, through from writers, actors and technicians, location scouts and everybody else that’s part of making a really good advert.
That combination of imagination, craft and that whole ecosystem is what I think is so special in the United Kingdom. We’re at the moment working with Shriti Vadera and Peter Bazalgette on putting together our Industrial Strategy for the creative industries. We decided as a government that the creative industries are one of the eight key sectors in the UK that are potential growth sectors we want to build on.
And putting that together, one of the key elements that we keep on arguing with the Treasury and the Department for Business and Trade and everybody else in government is that this is an ecosystem. You don’t get great British films without great British marketing of films. You don’t get great British films without actors who probably performed on the stage as well as in television and in movies. You don’t get great British actors without a commercial theatre that’s successful in the UK and also without a subsidised theatre in the UK.
All of these things hang together, and it’s really important that we promote the whole of that sector. And that’s, of course, why we are the second largest exporter of advertising in the world. I remember when I first came across this statistic, I thought: “That can’t be right. It must just be the second largest in Europe.” But we are the second largest in the world and I think we could do a great deal more boasting about that.
I don’t know whether there’s anybody in advertising who could promote the idea of advertising being a very significant part of our economy, worth £21 billion of GVA in 2023 and on track this year for £43 billion of spending. So in the words of Yazz: the only way is up.
We are very keen on this being a cooperation between industry and government. So first of all, the single most important thing we know that we can do to enable this industry to grow in the UK is to provide political, fiscal and economic stability in the country, so that people can make long-term investments and know where they’re going.
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And secondly, as I just said, we’re working on our Industrial Strategy for the creative industries. If there’s stuff that you still feel that you have you haven’t heard from us in this world, then please do get in touch.
Thirdly, obviously, there’s a really important issue around skills. For me, this is a matter of passionate belief that you don’t get a good education unless you also get a good creative education. I want to praise Eton and Winchester and everybody else, because they’ll have a pottery class, they’ll have an art room, they’ll have a well equipped theatre, they’ll have a dance studio, they’ll have musical instruments. I just want that for every single child in this country, and that’s why I think it’s so important that we turn the corner on the curriculum in the UK.
That’s what Bridget Phillipson as the Secretary of State for Education is very intent on doing. Trying to bring a creative education right back into the heart, so that it’s not just STEM, which is very important, but STEAM, including arts and creative education, is part of it.
Secondly, we need to reform the Apprenticeship Levy. I know lots of people in the industry have said to me: “It just doesn’t work for us at the moment.” And that’s what we’re very focused on doing.
The first thing we’ve already done is we’ve announced that from August this year, you won’t have to do a 12-month apprenticeship. You’ll be able to do six months and that’s so important for people who are working on a project base, and we need to provide a greater sense of portability between different employers as well, to be able to make that Apprenticeship Levy work across the creative sector.
Indeed, there’s a perfectly good argument for saying, because of the ecosystem that I’ve been talking about, that the Apprenticeship Levy should enable you to go from different parts of the ecosystem to be able to perfect your craft.
Now just a few specific things on the Online Advertising Taskforce. Online has provided new challenges and new opportunities. I’m really glad that the influencer working group has come up with its fourth version of a code of conduct, the first in the world. If anybody knows any influencers who could persuade more influencers to take up the influencers’ code of conduct, I’ll be really grateful.
But that is a really important campaign, because it goes to this issue of trust. If it becomes a whole world when you simply can’t trust what you’re seeing in front of you as promoting a product, then that undermines the whole of the industry. So I think the more we can do in that field, the better.
I’m really grateful for the work that’s being done on an AI working group. At the moment we’re engaged in a consultation on this and precisely how it works out in relation to copyright. I am absolutely clear that we as a country sell IP. It’s one of the key things that we sell. So making sure that we have a strong copyright system in the UK, that we maintain that, and maintain the ability of people to be remunerated and to control their rights, is a vital part of anything we do in this field.
But of course, many of you will use AI in all sorts of different ways already, and my guess is in two or three years’ time, every single person will have an AI assistant of some kind on their laptop or on their phone. We need to make sure that we think that there’s a possibility for a win-win in this. If you haven’t looked at the consultation yet, please do. It closes on February 25.
On less healthy food, some of you might be interested in this subject. Obviously the previous government legislated in relation to less healthy foods and advertising, and we did too in the statutory instrument that was brought forward just before Christmas. I’ve already had several meetings with the ASA. We are very keen on coming to a sensible solution. I think a bit of common sense in this space would be really, really useful. We discussed the matter. I’m saying to you what I said to the ASA the other day. Our priority is proportionate regulation and clear guidance for businesses operating in the sector. And as you would expect from us, we want to reduce the NHS backlog, and we want to support people to lead healthier lives. We want there to be incentives for brands to offer more healthy products. That only happens if we have a clear set of guidance that is proportionate and sensible. I can’t go any further than that, because I’ve got another meeting with all the organisations concerned next week.
I want to end with my key point, which is that we are very serious about growing the creative industries in the UK. I heard somebody say: “Well, aren’t the arts and the creative industries a bit frou-frou?” I don’t know what that means, really, but I get the point, I suppose.
But actually, if the UK had no creative industries, we would be a poorer, weaker, less happy, less stable society than we are. And I think that the creative industries not only have an economic role to play – a vastly significant one, one in 14 people in the UK works in the creative industries today and I guess it will be one in 10 in a few years’ time – but if we’re going to build that, we need you to tell us what are the barriers to growth in your sector.
We need to make sure that there’s a steady stream of people through into these industries. I asked this question last year, and I’m going to ask it again, and I’m going to keep on asking every single year that I come here, which is: If you came to my constituency and asked a 13 year old: “What are you going to do when you grow up, or what careers are you thinking about?” They would probably know what it is to be a doctor and how they would start trying to be a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, but they wouldn’t have the faintest idea how they would start the process of going into advertising or any of the other creative industries.
So in four years’ time, I would like us to be in a place where every single child in the country has the creative industries, including advertising, as one of the possible future careers for them, and that they know how to approach that, so that your seats are taken in 10, 15, 20 years’ time by young people who might just as well come from Wigan, Gateshead, Newcastle, London, the Rhondda, Shetland. People with completely varied backgrounds and different experiences, so that they can bring their imagination and their storytelling to the great industry that is yours.
