- Advocacy group Women in Advertising, Communications and Leadership (WACL) has launched a creator-backed campaign designed to speed up gender equality and representation in the promoting industry, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
- Key to the hassle is a tie-up with 4 distinguished women creators who appear in various clips discussing what representation in promoting means to them. The campaign was made in partnership with Snap, YouTube, Pinterest and influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy.
- The campaign is an element of WACL’s ongoing “Represent Me” initiative, which similarly pushes for gender equality in the ads industry. The campaign arrives as recent findings indicate that marketing workforce diversity has slipped.
WACL’s latest effort relies on a growing body of evidence — including studies from Ipsos, System 1 and the Geena Davis Institute — indicating that ladies don’t feel accurately represented in promoting, particularly when it comes to intersectionality that also includes race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation and age. Accordingly, the advocacy group’s campaign is asking for change with an effort noteworthy for its heavy use of influencers for business-related marketing.
“The representation of ladies in promoting remains to be disgracefully inadequate. We, as an industry, are usually not taking this issue seriously enough,” said Nishma Patel Robb, president of WACL, in a press release. “This creative campaign demonstrates the breadth of real women and their stories, showing audiences every woman matters. Seeing the world through the eyes of those creators, all of whom have amassed a major following, is proof that audiences want to hear from women like these.”
Central to the hassle are partnerships with 4 female creators, each of whom embody the intersectionality of being a lady combined with other identifying qualities. Among them are: Trina Nicole, a body confidence influencer and founding father of the UK’s first plus-size dance class; Ellen Jones, a author, speaker and activist for neurodiversity and LGBTQ+ issues; Jamelia Donaldson, founder and CEO of TreasureTress and advocate for the natural hair landscape; and Lucy Edwards, a broadcaster, journalist, writer and disability activist.
Videos for the campaign feature WACL Represent Me committee members Selma Nicholls and Chloe Davies in personal conversations, asking the creators to answer the query, “What does representation in promoting mean to you?” and the way that impacts their outlook and work. They were then invited to sit down together to explore the subject, and the conversations were edited right into a short-film, in addition to shorter clips.
EssenceMediacomX under a team led by Jessica Lenehan supported the campaign with media planning and by activating paid promoting credits supplied by Pinterest, Snapchat and YouTube.
The latest move from WACL builds upon a previous effort that highlighted the importance of positive gender representation in promoting on young girls and their future possibilities. This 12 months’s execution, made in collaboration with Billion Dollar Boy, calls on everyone to be a part of the conversation and champion a more positive and authentic representation of every kind of ladies in promoting.
“This campaign matters because creators are pushing our industry forward. Through the audiences they’ve built, they’ve realised the necessity for greater representation and their very own power to challenge the establishment and demand higher for all women in promoting,” said Becky Owen, global CMO at Billion Dollar Boy, in a press release. “Creator marketing has put latest voices, diverse voices and representative voices at the guts of our industry.”
The campaign also comes as some findings indicate that workplace diversity in marketing has slipped. Specifically, ethnic representation amongst marketers fell last 12 months, reversing a yearslong trend that saw diversity on an upward trajectory, according to a report from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing and SeeHer. Women proceed to drive the promoting and marketing workforce, per the report, making up a majority in 2023.
Brands have also gotten involved in the conversation on a bigger scale. For example, E.l.f. Beauty recently launched a campaign, entitled “So Many Dicks,” calling for more diversity in U.S. corporate boardrooms. The campaign’s name is inspired by the finding that there are nearly as many men named Richard, Rick or Dick as women from diverse groups on U.S. corporate boards.
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