Over the last few years, the advertising industry has taken major strides towards better representation regarding diversity within advertising campaigns, teams and staffing, and actual change-driving initiatives.
To achieve true equity, advertisers must ensure that they are also prioritizing their ad budgets within diverse-owned media and partnering with publishers, media companies and vendors that are owned and operated by diverse leadership.
To help advertisers better understand how to successfully accomplish this and drive transformative change, Connatix partnered with Digiday to survey nearly 90 brands and agencies in its State of Media Diversity report. We found that while the majority of survey respondents (81%) are allocating some percentage of budgets toward spending with diverse media, challenges still remain with standardization, categorization and public information about leadership teams and media owners.
One major takeaway we noted is that a sizable majority of brands and agencies have gone to work on the DE&I commitments they made in 2020 and 2021. On the agency side, GroupM unveiled efforts to grow and support diverse and Black-owned media companies. It announced a 2% pledge, calling on its clients to invest at least that amount of their annual media spend in diverse and Black-owned media. Target on the other hand, shared its plan to invest at least 5% of its annual media budget with Black-owned media beginning this year, along with announcing a project with REVOLT in support of Black entrepreneurs, part of its multi-million dollar investment in the Black-owned multimedia platform.
For the approximately 20% of brands and agencies that have yet to start but plan to do so, or that haven’t put any plan in place, the reasons for the gap may be tied to bandwidth and the process itself. Identifying partners that can deliver and perform on these needs is a challenge, and truly understanding the diversity within these teams has proven difficult.
When it comes to allocating budgets towards publishers owned and operated by diverse leadership, slightly more than half (52%) of the brands and agencies in our survey noted they are either primarily focusing (30%) on allocating business to publishers owned and operated by diverse leadership, or they’re doing so in tandem with seeking diverse representation in their campaigns (22%). While efforts have been made in this space, from companies like GroupM to Dentsu, from Coca-Cola to General Motors, there is still plenty of work left to be done. For example, Impremedia, which publishes two of the longest-standing Spanish-language dailies in the U.S., recently told Digiday that it's only seen incremental upticks in ad spend around certain times of year in the past 12 months, such as Hispanic Heritage Month.
The answer often centers on advertisers and agencies taking the time to build or rebuild their vendor lists to identify and empower the relationships they want to initiate. For example, Kenny Mac, diverse audience marketing lead, vice president and strategy director at Giant Spoon said that “One of the things that we’ve been doing, and challenging some of our clients to do, too, is look at your vendor list. If you’re going to go out with a bid, make sure that vendors have ownership in different diverse groups.”
At Connatix, we provide our advertisers with lists of diverse-owned publishers in our network that they can target. This tends to be an effective process, as our survey respondents claimed. A vast majority of respondents (88%) said their work on building vendor lists to reach diverse partners had been somewhat (42%) to very effective (46%). That said, more than half of our respondents (54%) said they’re not getting to the very-effective stage (42%) of vendor-list construction, or they are genuinely struggling with the effort (12%). The challenges in play are primarily a lack of vendor-list standardization, clarity around classifications and categories to include on vendor lists and gaps around needed information about the makeup of a given leadership team’s diversity.
While to date there has been some industry-wide work completed to help advertisers overcome these challenges – for example the ANA, AIMM and the 4A’s created and published lists for identifying diversity-certified suppliers for marketers – it’s clear there is still more work to be done, and finding and partnering with the right vendors is the first step.
To learn more about the progress made to date and how we can continue to evolve our DE&I efforts, download the "State of Media Diversity” Report.