Scaling Love
Four decades in advertising and 17 years building a taboo-busting tech platform, from a for-profit conviction to scaling love.
"I don't wait for things to change. I make them change."
Cindy Gallop is the founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, the social sex video-sharing platform she describes as the startup the world asked for. A veteran of the advertising industry, she is known for saying in public what most of the business is too paranoid to say, and for arguing that the industry holds enormous power it keeps handing to big tech.
Gallop built her career inside agencies alongside people who understood what creativity can do in sociocultural terms, work that led her to the belief that the future of business is doing good and making money at the same time. She has worked with the Ad Council for 26 years, first as a member of a campaign review committee and in recent years as one of three CRC chairs alongside Susan Cradley and Margaret Johnston-Cooper, helping shape public service work at strategy, creative and rough-cut stages. By her account she has spent 40 years in the business of getting people to do things they had no intention of doing.
In 2009 Gallop launched MakeLoveNotPorn at TED, and the viral response to a tiny website convinced her she had uncovered a global social issue. Seventeen years on she runs it as a for-profit tech platform, and, locked out of funding, banking, payments and standard services by adult content policies, she is building her own infrastructure across ed tech, fintech, ad tech and AI, plus a sex education extension, MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy. In April she launched Yes Sex Please We're British with UK member of Parliament Samantha Niblett, a campaign she says has secured an approved Parliamentary debate on lifelong sex education.
I am out to prove you can scale love, and I'm scaling love.
"You decide what you want the future to be, and then you make it happen."
Gallop argues that almost nobody in the industry has a real philosophy of what its future should be, and that this vacuum is why it keeps taking whatever the platforms offer. Her method is to decide what she wants the future to be, then use the technology to make it happen and partner with the technology on her terms. She insists she already knows what AI advertising should look and feel like, while the industry pleads with OpenAI.
"We continue to be a male-dominated industry. Everything we do is through the male lens."
For Gallop the deepest damage is structural, and it lives in who approves the work. It does not matter how many women sit in the lower ranks, she says, if a white male ECD refuses to run the campaign. Only when women, people of colour, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities create and sign off the work does advertising begin to speak to and sell to the world as it really is.
"I say the answer to everything literally is fund female founders."
Gallop points to the 1.7% of venture capital that reaches female founders as the reason the internet has never been built through the female lens at scale. She believes women bring radical ideas that never see funding, and that a safer, better and more lucrative future depends on backing them. Her own answer, when the ecosystem shut her out, was to start building the infrastructure herself.
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