Inclusivity Isn’t Just a Positive Worldview. It’s Smart Marketing.
Content by Manu Gabaldon
Living and breathing a culture is a start, but it’s not enough.
Most of us in the advertising industry have learned that we’re not always the target. Oftentimes, an ad won’t speak to you because it simply isn’t talking to you anyway. We learn to move past what we like, and what we’d want to see, and learn to understand and develop what our audience needs and wants to see, and how they’d benefit from the brands and products we represent.
Because that’s our ultimate goal: a win-win scenario in which the brand is matched with the people whose lives it can enhance and whose lives it can make easier, better, or just more entertaining.
At Big, we’ve built a multicultural component over the years that involves strategists with interesting backgrounds and experience reaching out to audiences beyond the general market. But on top of that, our entire staff has broadened what we all identify as opportunity segments as part of just a natural evolution of our society.
Inclusivity just makes sense—as a person, and even more so as a marketer. The more the merrier, right? Especially when we’re all trying to make a difference vs. just making the sale.
What’s even more exciting is collaborating with clients who get it just as much as we do. Who see the potential to have an impact at the largest scale possible. Clients like Valvoline, who recently developed a total market campaign starring a U.S. Hispanic actor. The 100% bilingual campaign resonated with our Hispanic audience beyond language and representation, because of the statement this all-American brand made by casting him as its campaign spokesman.
Past clients like Tenet Healthcare valued our understanding of the unique attitudes and hesitations women of different cultural backgrounds could have when it comes to preventive healthcare.
Psychographic vs demographic insights played a huge role in the planning of a breast cancer awareness campaign that addressed this audience directly. The goal of this campaign was to ease women’s concerns right from the start—to encourage them to schedule the mammograms they were scared of, or didn’t think important enough to make time for in the grand scheme of their day-to-day family life.
Most recently, our work for the Alabama 2020 Census had a uniquely important and challenging mission of urging Hispanics to let their voices and their families be counted.
Political and immigration-related fears stood in the way of the state’s ability to allocate necessary funds to multicultural communities should each group not provide accurate information about their household count. With the help of ¡HICA! and our internal resources, we were able to pinpoint and directly address the top concerns that stopped Hispanics from filling out their census. And we urged them not to lose sight of what was on the line: better schools, better community assistance programs, better access to healthcare, and most importantly, better representation in Congress.
The message was clear: Have your voice heard, anonymously, so that we can help allocate the resources we all need for a better life in Alabama.
As the U.S. is growing more and more diverse every year, representation in advertising will continue to become increasingly essential—in more ways than one. And here at Big, we’re proud to be a step ahead.