Culture is shaped by stories the media industry consumes and creates. Every casting decision, every edit in an ad, every character name in a script quietly answers the question of who belongs at the centre of the stories we tell about ourselves and each other.
Over the past decade, the media industry has learned how to “look” diverse—adding a person of colour here, a queer character there and a disability storyline there.
But as the Who Gets Cast, Who Gets Missed, and Why It Matters panel at Cairns Crocodiles, presented by Pinterest, made clear, much of this is still performative. Inclusion is being added late in the process to tick a box, rather than baked into the DNA of the story.
And yet, as several panellists admitted, the media industry is not at a point where it can simply discard tokenism altogether.
In a landscape built on decades of exclusion, those clumsy checkboxes and “diversity briefs” are, for now, one of the few levers forcing representation onto the agenda.
They’re not perfect, but they’re also part of the bridge from invisibility to something more honest.
The question isn’t whether tokenism should exist, but how we move through it, rather than get stuck there.
Tina Provis, a senior influencer specialist at Havas Red, had herself been on the receiving end of ‘tokenism’ accusations being an Asian Australian woman on Love Island. She was the first to raise the topic during the panel.
“Unfortunately, there is a little bit of tokenism, but I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, because if you don’t start, then where do you even begin?’” she said.
Her point reflects a broader challenge facing the media industry. While representation has improved, many groups remain underrepresented on Australian screens. According to Screen Australia’s Seeing Ourselves 2 report, First Nations people accounted for 7.2 per cent of main TV drama characters, while people with disability represented 6.6 per cent and LGBTQ+ people 7.4 per cent.
This lack of representation also crosses over into ads. A recent study by GN Hearing found that just 14 per cent of Australians recall seeing hearing devices represented in advertising for everyday products or services in the past year.
This can lead to factually incorrect and misrepresented ads for disadvantaged people. On the flip side, when casting is done correctly the spot is much more organic and factually correct.
“We worked with a program, and they cast a person who was blind, and in the writers’ room, they didn’t include the blind person in the writers room. The script said that when the person who was blind met someone, that that person would feel their face as a way of knowing what that person looked like. That is not how a blind person interacts with a person, and the script was changed. Having a person in that room, in that concept, ideation was fundamental to authentic storytelling,” Paul Nunnari, CEO Inclusively Made said.
Nunnari and Inclusively Made are trailblazers in the space, doing some really important work for diversity and inclusion. Its work helps leaders embed disability inclusion from day one. It does this through accreditation pathways that are designed to empower brands, creative agencies and production companies to lead inclusion with confidence.
Leo Australia’s Seamus Fagan added that he and copywriter Shy Ganglani (also a Cairns Crocodiles speaker) actively work to bring diversity into the agency’s work.
“We’re both people of colour. When we’re writing these scripts, we’re taking them from personal experiences that we’ve had, and we’re putting them into these scripts,” he said.
As Fagan explained this results in people of all backgrounds being able to relate to the ad which ultimately makes it more engaging and interesting.
Another little thing that he does that other script writers could easily do is calling “characters whatever you want”.
“Instead of just being Alex, it could be Alejandro, or whatnot,” he said.
He explained that this has a positive domino effect. “When people are casting these people, they’ve actually got something in their head that they want to cast towards.”
Fagan proves that agencies, brands, and the general media can move through tokenism. And with the help of Inclusively Made, agencies and the voices of underrepresented communities, there won’t be a need for a panel talking on the topic of inclusion in the next five years.
