Advertising is the business model for the internet. Stop giving the power away. And prove you can scale love.

Gallop was fortunate to build her career at agencies with people who understood what creativity can do in powerful sociocultural ways, and it led her to the belief that the future of business is doing good and making money simultaneously. The industry wields enormous power that most people don't fully realise, because at its best it transforms brands and businesses by transforming attitudes and behaviour. She has spent 40 years getting people to do things they had no intention of doing, and she has always argued we should use that power for good.

Much of it requires no extra effort. Years ago a large agency presented an Ad Council campaign that was great, and she asked for one small thing: flip the genders. Put the boy in the kitchen with mom and the girl on the soccer field with dad. No extra budget, no problem for the client, and you role model as you should.

The most obvious pattern is that if we want to sell to the world as it really is, we need to reflect the world as it really is, and the industry is not doing it. If anything it is going backwards, at the same time as society is, because the anti-wokeness wave means it is now acceptable not even to pay lip service to diversity and inclusion. A sea of white men at the top and nobody cares.

Gallop tells women founders not to start nonprofits, because they get marginalised and nobody takes you seriously until you are taken seriously financially. She knew she had to build a tech platform like everything springing up around her. Marc Andreessen said love does not scale, meaning empathy cannot scale and only money and power do. She is out to prove you can scale love, and she is scaling love.

It began almost accidentally when she discovered through dating younger men that when we don't talk openly and honestly about sex, porn becomes sex education by default. She put up a clunky website and launched it at TED in 2009, becoming the only TED speaker to utter 'cum on my face' on the stage. The talk went viral and thousands wrote to her, pouring their hearts out, and she realised she had uncovered a huge global social issue. She calls it the startup the world asked for.

The issue isn't porn, it is that we do not talk about sex openly and honestly in the real world. If we did, people would bring a real-world mindset to what is performative produced entertainment. So she took every dynamic in social media and applied it to this one area of universal human experience that no other platform allows, setting out to socialize sex, normalising and destigmatising it and bringing it out of the shadows into the sunlight.

Asked how far the world has moved, Gallop rejects the passive framing. She doesn't wait for things to change, she makes them change, parallel-pathing the platform and the context around it, because a world-changing startup means changing the world to fit it. The proof is that parents now buy their teenagers subscriptions, including a mother whose 12-year-old was watching Pornhub and another who asked for a family plan for three sons.

In April she launched Yes Sex Please We're British with member of Parliament Samantha Niblett, to get the whole of Britain talking about sex, with a Parliamentary debate approved on lifelong sex education. Emma Thompson has endorsed it, some Great British brands are in the pipeline, and the aim is a national template other countries can learn from.

To own the future you often have to blow it all up and start again. The industry saw this with digital and gave its power to the tech world, which was a huge mistake, because advertising is the business model for the internet and the billions of Zuckerberg and Spiegel do not exist without it. The same opportunity is here with AI. The industry has the money, so it should decide what the technology does for it, rather than pleading with OpenAI, and use that financial power for good.

The most damage comes from the fact that the industry is still male-dominated and everything is done through the male lens. It does not matter how many women sit in the lower ranks if the white male ECD kills the campaign. When women, Black people, people of colour, LGBTQ people and people with disabilities create, direct and run the ads, you get advertising that speaks to and sells to the world. As long as the industry does not represent the world, that will never happen.

Gallop's honesty has made nothing harder and everything easier, because she is always being herself. At Cannes she watched leaders paranoid about their panels, sending questions ahead, rehearsing keynotes, worried about corporate comms and their CEO's reaction to a soundbite. She refuses to see the questions in advance.

Many people don't even know that freedom is possible. The single most paralysing dynamic in business and in life is fear of what other people will think, and it now runs through social media, where one wrong step makes you the internet's main character for the day. But the fear is overblown. The industry could do with far more marketers speaking boldly and authentically, because that plays well with Gen Z and everyone else.

Gallop still doesn't see founders with truly radical ambitions, especially women, because women are not encouraged to think big and are never funded to build and scale big. Only 1.7% of venture capital reaches female founders, which is why the internet has never been built through the female lens at scale. Her answer to everything is fund female founders.

The category she would back is her own, sex tech. All her problems are infrastructure problems: she can't get funded, banked, take payments or advertise, and every tech service bans adult content. So she is building her own ecosystem, with sex tech at the core plus ed tech, fintech, ad tech and AI, so others can use it and it funds MakeLoveNotPorn. She is hopeful about the onrush of creator energy at Cannes, and the creators asking how to make it work for them.