Three out of 4 Americans fear that large technology companies have too much power over their lives. Kieley Taylor is using her influence through GroupM to keep the tech industry accountable.
Kieley might not be as well known as Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, or Andy Jassy. But as the Global Head of Partnerships at GroupM, her word carries the weight of the largest single buyer of advertising on Facebook, Google, Amazon, and more. With billions in annual media spend behind her, Kieley is the kind of person whose calls get answered.
And she’s using that power to make Big Tech’s platforms and products that are now central to our day-to-day lives more human-friendly.
The changes that Kieley and her team bring about may not make the news, but they do make a difference. Like when Kieley saw that a major platform’s brand safety filter—designed to help brands avoid funding racist or hateful content—was mistakenly flagging legitimate publishers writing about race or LGBTQ issues, robbing them of essential advertising revenue. Kieley worked with GroupM’s brand safety team to elevate the issue and work with the platform’s product team to get it fixed. Now the platform and GroupM are collaborating to create a tool that will ensure good publishers never get penalized for tackling important topics.
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When I see something, I say something,” says Kieley. “And that has led to some positive changes.”
Kieley is working with other platforms to fix tools that inadvertently drive children deeper into dangerous rabbit holes, like search fields that autocomplete for “thinspiration” content. Once, when Kieley discovered that an acquaintance of hers had repeatedly flagged child exploitation content on a major social media site to no avail, she arranged a meeting between the acquaintance and the site’s product team. The result was a dropdown menu that made it easier to report—and ultimately remove—such content.
Kieley would be trying to make these kinds of changes wherever she worked. But because she works at the world’s biggest media-investment company, her efforts have an impact. “Normally, a person in my position would be speaking to a sales person,” she says. “So, when I get that person from a product or policy team on the other end of the phone, and they are willing to think through hard decisions with me, that’s when I know I’m using my powers for good.”
Not that Kieley is solely motivated by altruism. Having recently become a mother, Kieley is acutely aware of the dangers awaiting her son online. “I want to make sure our industry learns from the mistakes of the past as we build new environments and products, because that’s the internet my son is going to grow up with,” she says. Like all parents, Kieley views any day that she can use her position to make the world safer for her child as a good day. And with the power of GroupM behind her, Kieley is helping to create better days ahead for everyone.