DISRUPTING THE DISRUPTORS

Words BRODIE LANCASTER

spent on Facebook advertising in 2021. They will do this by harnessing “the infinite power we have as a community,” Fennessy suggests. The “8” in the platform’s name both evokes the infinity symbol and references the eight areas of impact in which the diverted funds are spent: climate change, food, health, education, equality, water, peace, and animal welfare.

“Social media is the medium of our time, right? But it hasn’t evolved to a place that serves the people,” Fennessy says. “I became really obsessed with reinventing the ad model to get that money back into the hands of people. After doing that, how do we then reimagine social in a way that has zero tolerance for hate and no anonymity? They’re the two threads we’ve spent the past seven years and $35m building.”

Photography AMIE MILNE

Born and raised in Melbourne, Fennessy moved to New York in 2009 and founded data aggregator Standard Media Index (SMI). By then, she had spent 20 years leading global sponsorship agency MM Communications and digital entertainment company Frontiers Group. Technology has been driving her work and thinking for decades, and it was in her role as chief executive of SMI that she got a front-row seat to the relationship between technology corporations and advertisers.

In her time there, she watched as the portion of the US$500bn annual global advertising spend that once bolstered local news, radio and television—constructs she believes “hold communities together”—shrank dramatically. Meanwhile, funds ploughed into Facebook, which in her view “didn’t share anything with people”, grew exponentially.

“I was in the US when the Federal Reserve came out with a statistic that 40 per cent of all Americans cannot find $400 in an emergency,” she recounts from her office in London, where she now lives and works. That was a catalysing moment. “I realised … each of us, in the US and Australia, is worth about $400 a year to Facebook alone. We’re in this shocking economic crisis, yet we’re being stripped of value.” Fennessy says social media users have quietly become an enormous unpaid workforce; they are generating the content that captures the audience attention which earns these platforms their advertising dollars. “When you see that injustice, you can’t unsee it,” she notes.

When advertisers buy placements on WeAre8, four per cent of their budget automatically goes to a charitable cause (they can choose from one curated by WeAre8 or select one of their own to support). A further one per cent goes to climate projects and five per cent toward carbon offsets.

The system also supports original content ideas, funnelling another five per cent of that advertising spend to a creator fund to reward artistic expression. This unseats the norm on other platforms where influencers receive money from brands or agencies to promote a product in ads thinly veiled as creative content.

As for general users—or “citizens” as they are called at WeAre8—those who watch two minutes of ads per day are also paid for their attention. It’s an appealing proposition both for users and for brands that value a captive audience. These micropayments, which users can choose to keep or pass along to charities, are derived from another 50 per cent of every ad buy. In a different kind of reminder that attention is a valuable resource, WeAre8 also sends citizens an alert to get off the app after using it for eight minutes.

Despite its promise, it might take time for people to buy what WeAre8 is selling. We are so accustomed to donating our time, content, data, behaviour and activity to platforms that getting something in return invites scepticism. “We have come to understand that as the norm,” Fennessy says. “The thought of getting something in return for the same behaviour is hard to compute, I think, when you first hear it.”

No doubt the current state of social media—marked by Twitter’s high-profile chaos and speculation about Meta’s decline—is opportunistic. An article published by New York Magazine in January about Elon Musk’s influence on Twitter pointed out that it was only a decade ago that Twitter was inspiring “utopian visions of how social networks could promote democracy and human rights around the world”. Now we are talking about the cultural and economic freefall of these big social media players.

With advertisers hitting pause on Twitter en masse, the platform’s daily revenue is reported to have plummeted 40 per cent from January 2022 figures. Meanwhile, mass layoffs across Meta’s various products—which include Facebook and Instagram—were headline news at the end of 2022, and the company began 2023 with a AU$600m (€390m) fine in the European Union for violating the region’s privacy policies.

TikTok also has its problems. Last year it was widely reported that nearly 40 per cent of Gen Z users were turning to TikTok over Google as a search engine at the same time that a research report by internet trust and safety body NewsGuard found that almost 20 per cent of videos it offered up contained misinformation. More recently, US Congress banned TikTok from being installed on federal devices due to security concerns that the Chinese government could leverage its parent company to access those devices. More than 30 states and a number of public universities also implemented bans, calling into question the app’s future in the largest social media ad market in the world.

For those of us concerned with what social media is doing to our communities, our democracy, and our brains, it often feels like we only have two options: either participate with mounting denial and disdain, or completely abstain. Alternatives have sprung up over time but in terms of media investment, none have actually posed any serious disruption of the social model itself. If successful, WeAre8 will be the first platform that says we needn’t sacrifice our moral values to use social media while reminding us of our dollar value as users.

To that end, Fennessy is clear-eyed on her mission. After running the numbers, it’s hard not to be. “There are 21 million social media users in Australia alone,” she says. “If 20 million people in Australia joined WeAre8 and watched just two minutes of ads a day, in one month that would be $360m back to people, $7m to climate solutions, $3m to a creator fund, and $28m to charity. Every month.”

When WeAre8 was introduced in this country late last year, with former Nine executive Lizzie Young at the helm, The Australian Financial Review reported it was on track to hit 8 million users in the UK by the end of the 2023 financial year, with a goal to reach 100 million users worldwide at the same time. So far, WeAre8 has attracted commercial partners such as Suncorp, SBS, Coles and Telstra, with high profile figures such as sportsman Adam Goodes, journalist Sarah Wilson and performer Tsehay Hawkins joining as “changemakers” or advocates for broader uptake of the app.

Beyond this, Fennessy measures WeAre8’s success against a bigger, human picture. She explains: “That includes ‘How many meals did we get to people in need? How many people did we get access to fresh water? How many animals did we support? What impact did we have on the climate?’ Collective impact is really massive for me.”

She adds that she used to be furious about what the major tech corporations were doing to the world. “We [as users] were making $120bn a year for Facebook,” she says. “I was driven by anger and the injustice of that.” But that anger is no longer the motivating force. “Now we’ve built the whole framework and we’ve come up with a solution. The anger drives us at a certain point but then it doesn’t serve us anymore.”

In an ironic twist, Fennessy says that more than anything, she is appreciative of the original architects of the social media era. “I know that sounds like some sort of weird personal evolution, but I’m thankful to Zuckerberg now. Because you know what he did? He connected 2 billion people. Now we’re going to inspire them, empower them and unite them.”

The WeAre8 app is free to download on Android and iOS. weAre8.com

So often associated with the good life, oysters have a long and winding path to travel before they reach the crushed ice platter. For one Australian producer, the journey itself is making a difference.

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