Episode 21 – Cindy Gallop

This Way Up

“I looked around and I thought, if I stopped to think about what I'm here to do, launch an English agency brand into this market. If I thought about that, I would just go home, get into bed, pull the covers it never come out again.”

In this episode, I had the privilege to interview Cindy Gallop at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity earlier this year. Cindy for those who don’t know, is the founder of Make Love Not Porn - an entirely user generated crowdsource video sharing platform that celebrates real world sex. A start-up that rose to fame after Cindy’s most talked about presentation at the 2009 TED conference.

Cindy wasn’t always in the start-up world, before this she had a very successful career in advertising, culminating with setting up the US division of the famous ad agency BBH. As usual I go through her entire career and the key themes within her journey that we can learn from.

And of course, being Cindy there is plenty to learn from. Cindy tells it like it is and I love for her it. For example, we talk about sex and society's reluctance to talk openly and honestly about it. The danger of porn becoming sex education when it’s simply manufactured entertainment. This is why she started her company ‘Make love not porn’ to try and combat that very problem.

We also talk about the advertising industry as a whole, Cindy is very vocal on social media about trying to really change this industry. We talk at length about how sexual harassment is such a big problem and how we need this industry to do a whole lot more to fix its damaging effects.

We discuss some really important topics that hopefully we can all learn from.

*Warning this episode contains explicit language*