Senior marketers, strategists and diversity experts have urged the industry to be ‘brave beyond the backlash’ and bake inclusivity into marketing.
Even though a quarter of Australians speak a language other than English at home, only 57 per cent of people born overseas and 48 per cent of people with a disability feel positively portrayed in Australian advertising.
At the B&T Breakfast Briefing, Inclusivity with Impact, the Australian lead for the UN Women Unstereotype Alliance, Annie Konieczny, told a room full of marketers and agency executives that brands that demonstrate they are inclusive and diverse in their marketing typically see a 3.4 per cent rise in short term sales and a 17 per cent increase in long term sales.
The Unstereotype Alliance has released the ‘Who’s Missing’ toolkit for marketers, creatives and media buyers to help them to embed inclusive thinking at the start of every campaign.
“You’ve got to move forward with these ideas if you want to reap the commercial benefits of inclusion, start the journey,” she said. “Backlash may happen, but if you’re brave and you have all your ducks in a row, as it were, you can definitely weather that storm.”
Unilever head of marketing, homecare, Kate Westgate said that the fear of “stuffing it up” and backlash were the biggest barriers to brands getting started. She pointed out that Dove, which is famous for its campaign for real beauty, regularly outperformed brands that do not take an inclusive approach to marketing and communications.
“To really make sure that you’re doing it authentically, you need to think about, firstly, who is in the room when we are making these decisions. We need diverse voices in the room, and that’s what can really make sure that you aren’t seeing any blind spots,” she said.
“Inclusion really needs to be baked into the brief right from the beginning. It needs to be embedded into the media plan, and it needs to be intentional. So you really need to be ensuring that you are putting it at the forefront of your briefs.”
Persistence pays
UM senior strategy director Alisha Imam urged persistence and to not let rejection from clients deter marketers and agency executives from pushing inclusive proposals forward.
“We know it makes business sense, it’s logical and rational. Once you find the right audience you may face rejection around getting clients on board, but you need to keep going to the point that you make it your purpose,” she said.
The panels were expertly moderated by Identity Communications managing director Santosh Murthy and Moonshot Marketing consultant Nicolette Briscoe.
The second panel discussed how to get inclusive creative execution right.
One brand that consistently hits the mark when it comes to inclusivity is the insurance company AAMI, which has used a diverse cast of women from different cultural backgrounds and with disabilities as the famous ‘AAMI girl’.
‘We brief inclusivity’
Suncorp head of brand and content Rapthi Thanapalasingam said that the approach at Suncorp looks beyond advertising campaigns.
“We are very inclusive in what we do from a casting perspective, ensuring we cover as much as we can. But for me, I think really making it part of your platform and your distinctive asset brings a lot of value,” she said.
One of Suncorp’s other brands, GIO, is in a test and learning phase in translating its creative to other languages like Mandarin.
“There was a lot of nervousness internally, because we hadn’t done something like that before, and we were very worried about the end to end user experience for the customer,” Thanapalasingam said.
“But that doesn’t mean don’t do it, and I think that’s the that’s the barrier we all have to get past. We know there’s an audience for the insurance category of Mandarin speakers.”
Suncorp trains its marketers and agency partners to use the Unstereotype Alliance’s ‘Who’s Missing’ toolkit; it’s part of their creative briefing process.
“There are ways, there are means, there are toolkits, there are everything at your fingertips to help you cut through on this process right at the beginning from a brief point of view, so that you’re not doing it later on and trying to be tokenistic about it,” Thanapalasingam said.
Multicultural Outdoor founder and chief executive Ronnie Navani spoke about the importance of language in the right cultural context.
He used an example of an outdoor campaign by online remittance service Remitly, which ran messages such as “no one does chai like chachi (aunty)” and “nobody makes naan like nani (grandmother)” — which will pull on the heart strings of Australia’s Indian diaspora.
“That creative connected emotionally,” he said. “I really miss my grandmother’s cooking. Unfortunately my grandmother passed away a while back, but I really remember those moments of the food that I was getting. It was just a simple nuance with creative from a great insight.”
Navani recommends brands test out ideas at an early stage, particularly when it comes to using languages other than English.
“Ask people within your team. Most marketers will have colleagues from different cultures and communities in their office. Ask them the question.
‘It doesn’t happen overnight’
VML chief strategy officer Alison Tilling said that popular marketing theory about consistency needs to be challenged because often it perpetuates “a kind of monocultural”.
Another problem she highlighted is that a lot of the tools creatives use are created exclusively for “white and Western in ways”.
She encouraged creatives to spend time consulting talent from different cultural backgrounds at every step of the process.
“You have to really think about the time and the emotional energy you’re going to put into those relationships, because they don’t just happen overnight. They have to become part and parcel of the way that we work,” she said.
Working with diverse talent, rather than speaking for multicultural communities was a key pillar of the keynote presentation by Ethnobility founder Sara Shams.
“When people see themselves reflected authentically, it sends a powerful message that you belong here too. That single message taught me something every brand agency and creative leader should know: authentic storytelling isn’t just about telling diverse stories, it’s about who gets to tell them, and how when inclusion is genuine, it becomes magnetic.
“Audiences don’t engage because they’re targeted. It’s because they feel seen.”
Shams said that the media and advertising industry has the power to either reinforce stereotypes or the power to rewrite them.
Identity Communications’ Santosh Murthy said that the aim of the event was not to provide all of the answers, but to equip the industry with the right questions. Top of that list is: “Who’s missing?”.
B&T will run extended highlights of Sham’s powerful speech tomorrow and photos from the event.
Inclusivity with Impact was sponsored by Identity Communications and Multicultural Outdoor, with Microsoft also supporting the event.
It is part of a series of B&T Breakfast Briefing events in partnership with Identity Communications.
The first event featured senior marketers from AGL and McDonald’s.
