Marketing and media consultancy, Ebiquity has teamed up with diversity specialist, DECA Media Consultancy to help brands and agencies reach more diverse audiences currently being missed by many campaigns.
Nationwide is the first brand to take advantage of the new service. The high-street bank is receiving an holistic overview of its media landscape, revealing the audiences it may have been missing in its media strategy and gaining guidance on how to effectively reach them to drive better marketing outcomes.
Chris Ladd, head of media at Nationwide, believes that the advertising industry is long overdue action on commitments to address diversity and inclusion.
He said: “The industry needs to fix this issue urgently, not just nod to it again. It’s evident that there is a paucity of insight, data and expertise across the whole advertising eco-system. We believe working with Ebiquity and DECA will help inform us and our agency partners as we review what we are doing. Hopefully, we can pass on ideas for action to others in our industry too. We all need to be better informed, be willing to share insights, and take action to build society, nationwide.”
Martin Radford, director, Ebiquity, said the DECA partnership reflected the need for the industry to try harder to speak to all audiences equally and was born out of both moral and commercial imperatives.
He said: “Advertisers have spent much of this year conveying a sense of community through their creative during lockdown but there is an overdue groundswell of desire to take this to the next step, especially in light of global movements such as Black Lives Matter.”
Christopher Kenna, DECA CEO said: “There are, of course, moral reasons to invest adspend in diverse media platforms, but the fact that so many businesses have been overlooking the value of ethnic, LGBTQ+ and disabled groups’ pounds is quite astonishing.
“There is a huge diversity dividend to be had by brands and agencies who better invest in the right media, often not even on conventional measurement systems, and with creative that is culturally relevant. But that ‘relevance’ must always be in the eyes of the beholder, not the client or advertiser.”
Kenna cites a 2019 ANA report, which says that consumers who perceive ads as being ‘culturally relevant’ are 2.6 times more likely to find the brand relevant to them and therefore 2.7 times more likely to purchase the brand for the first time. They are also 50% more likely to repurchase a brand they have bought in the past.
In addition, DECA’s (which stands for Diversity, Equality, Culture, Action) sister company, Brand Advance will offer individual brand perception surveys to test and develop culturally relevant creative content.
