YouTube row, not Brexit, tops agenda as admen hit London

IF London is going to thrive after Brexit, the creative industries will be crucial in driving growth and investment. A good example is Advertising Week Europe, a festival of creativity and media, taking place this week at an array of venues including the Picturehouse Central cinema in Piccadilly, Ronnie Scott’s in Soho and St James’s Palace, where the opening gala was held last night.

Now in its fifth year, this week’s event has attracted 30,000 attendees and some big-name speakers, including Al Gore (pictured), Jamie Oliver, Richard E Grant, Matthew Freud, England rugby coach Eddie Jones and Michael Roth, the global boss of ad group Interpublic. Nearly half of the speakers are women.

And, in a sign that the Mayor of London is taking it seriously, Sadiq Khan is speaking at an event with the Evening Standard’s owner, ESI Media, on Thursday. His predecessor, Boris Johnson, never took part, although City Hall has always been supportive.

Arguably what is most significant about this festival, a spin-off of the US version, is the roll call of companies that are involved. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Spotify, Snap, Bloomberg, Adobe and Oracle are some of the names that feature alongside UK companies such as Channel 4,

The Guardian, Digital Cinema Media and Primesight. In recent years, media and tech businesses have been some of the biggest investors in the UK’s creative industries, which are worth £77 billion a year to the economy.

Just look at the new tenants that are moving into prime locations across the capital: from Google, Havas and, soon, Universal Music in the new King’s Cross cluster to Omnicom, Ogilvy & Mather and News Corporation along the South Bank, from

Saatchi & Saatchi and Exterion Media in Holborn to Facebook’s forthcoming Rathbone Square development.

Most of these international companies decided to invest before the Brexit vote. The fear must now be that they could reduce their spend if they lose access to the European single market and find it harder to recruit global talent.

Even Matt Scheckner, an Anglophile New Yorker who founded Advertising Week in the US before expanding to London, wonders if he might have to move his festival.

“To some degree, all bets are off when Article 50 is triggered,” he says. “Five years from now, will Advertising Week Europe be in Amsterdam or Paris? I hope not.”

Scheckner thinks London still has plenty going for it, especially compared with his native New York.

“London’s embrace of the creative industries is a differentiator between London and New York,” he says. “From an economic point of view, from a quality-of-life point of view, from an image point of view, the public and private-sector leadership in London has recognised our industry matters.”

By contrast, New York has struggled to woo the creatives, he adds, especially as power has been shifting to Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

No one in London’s creative industries is feeling complacent with Article 50 looming.

But Brexit hasn’t been the biggest topic of discussion at Advertising Week Europe because ad chiefs have seen little impact on growth, beyond sterling’s depreciation.

David Kershaw, chief executive of M&C Saatchi, which worked on the Remain campaign, sees “no effect” from Brexit on the ad market — yet. Instead the hot topic of the week has been the growing crisis in digital advertising. Google’s YouTube is tackling a boycott from a number of UK advertisers including the Government, Marks & Spencer and Lloyds, worried about the risk of their ads appearing next to inappropriate content such as jihadist and anti-Semitic videos.

The fact that this row has blown up in London matters a lot to Google because the UK is its biggest market outside America.

A lot of European advertisers run their marketing from here and they regard London not only as a trendsetter but also as an upholder of industry standards.

That’s because, like London itself, the media industry is feisty, smart, cosmopolitan, competitive and entrepreneurial.

Brexit won’t change that.

Gideon Spanier is head of media at Campaign