Amy Williams tells Ambition A.M. the journey of Good-Loop and its aims to transform the advertising landscape into a positive force.
“I pitched my socks off,” Amy Williams says, laughing as she tells me how she can still remember the day when KitKat changed her life.
Just one year after launching her tech-for-good online advertising platform in 2016, the founder of Good-Loop found herself in The Next Big Thing pitch contest for Nestlé’s KitKat Sustainability Project.
Little did she know, with an opt-in ad model that allowed viewers to donate half the ad price after watching 15 seconds, she’d be headed to dinner later that night carrying, literally, an oversized cheque.
Even now, she can still remember the looks she received walking through the restaurant door.
“It was the most ostentatious thing I’ve ever done,” she says, still laughing.
Turns out, the win set her up for more than a dramatic arrival.
“The phone started ringing after that, and honestly, that was the moment that the flywheel began,” she says.
Good-Loop came to be with one goal in mind, Williams tells me, and it was to use the influential force of advertising for good. Now, there’s an extra special focus on people and the planet, too.
Since introducing her first skippable and opt-in advertising model, Williams has donated £8m (and counting) to charities.
“We took money from advertisers, we ran skippable video ads, and if you didn’t skip – if you sat on your hands and didn’t press that tempting skip button – then you unlocked a donation to fund a good cause,” she says.
“So we used media money to fund charities around the world and in doing that we delivered way better ad engagement for the advertisers.”
Using the evolution of the business and industry to her advantage, Williams says she continues to find new and innovative ways to make an impact, through connecting her clients with purposeful publishers and also tracking their online carbon footprints.
Going full circle
Over 80 of the world’s top 100 brands as clients and an international expansion (and move) later, Williams tells me there have been many more pivotal moments shaping her entrepreneurial career.
Just last year, the 32-year-old founder upped and moved her family to New York City – hungry to take a bite out of the Big Apple and the modern Madison Avenue.
International expansion seems to be a dream come true for many British entrepreneurs, but for Williams, it was almost as if she had to start building her business all over again.
“You are on a new frontier and it’s the exact same muscle memory as when I started the business in the UK,” she tells me from the early morning hours of her office in New York City.
“It’s test, learn, iterate, gather data, and then change your decision based on the new data available,” she says.
Fortunately, Williams had the strength of her team and Good-Loop’s long-established values to hold her up through the moving guilt and challenges that come with landing yourself in a brand new market.
“Even my dog was jetlagged,” she laughs.
Admitting that she doesn’t always enjoy the lack of ‘lie-in’ culture that comes with nestling yourself in with the hustle and bustle of New Yorkers, she tells me the future has never been brighter for her and her now 40-person team.
Work smarter, not harder
Williams admits there was once a time when she wanted to give up.
It was when she was 10 months into endless conversations and countless coffees explaining her idea that she asked herself: “Is this going to go anywhere?”
But, once she took the advice of a self-imposed one-year deadline, the foundation began to quickly form.
“In those [next] two months, I met my co-founder and I raised our first investment round,” she says.
Suddenly, she adds: “It morphed into something real.”
With the team now spread out on opposite sides of the pond, you could say William’s chosen leadership style is more fitting than ever to suit the needs of an internationally expanding team – as long as they focus on the outcomes first, that is.
“It’s so tempting to play the role of CEO or to play the role of founder and there’s so much opinion out there as to what a good one looks like,” she says.
Instead, Williams prefers to lay out the expectations and let her team – many of whom with equity – take the wheel.
“There’s a real opportunity to let people do their best work their best way and be their best self at work,” she says.
“But you have to be really clear with those expectations and the accountability or else you set people up to fail, which I have done in the past,” she adds.
Now, Williams tells me the future of Good-Loop stands within the continuous evolution of ‘good media.’
And with the annual global spend on digital advertising ticking its way closer to the $1 trillion mark, that’s a good place to be.
Best piece of advice: never run in the office
When I was a junior account executive just starting out, I used to dart around the office, desperately trying to catch the creative director before she clocked off or action one last amend before our deadline.
Everything was last minute and everything was life or death – or at least that’s how it feels when you’re junior and in over your head.
Then one day a colleague I deeply respected took me aside and told me to stop running in the office. She told me to consider busyness not as a signal of my ‘industrious importance’ but rather as a signal I was out of control. Her advice really made me think about the signals I was sending professionally.
She taught me to have less haste, and more urgency and to instil trust by approaching even the most difficult challenges with grace.
CV
Name: Amy Williams
Company: Good-Loop
Founded: 2016
Staff: 40
Title: CEO and founder
Age: 32
Born: UK
Lives: NYC
Studied: Psychology at Warwick University
Talents: Finding treasure in thrift stores
Motto: If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit
Most known for: My face was on a billboard in Times Square once
First ambition: Get a boyfriend
Favourite book: Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo