Advertisers often talk about supporting Black- and minority-owned media companies. It’s Mark Prince’s job to help them turn those pledges into action.
Prince joined Dentsu Media in May 2021 as SVP and head of economic empowerment, which is a new role for the agency.
He and his team create DEI investment benchmarks for clients and encourage brands to rethink the way they evaluate media partners.
It’s “no secret” that media companies with diverse ownership, including both digital publishers and TV broadcasters, have struggled with the evaluation criteria that brands typically use to select media partners, says Prince, speaking on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks.
Brands that only want high reach and low CPMs will often end up excluding viable and deserving publishers from their media plans.
“If you didn’t fit in those two buckets, it was ‘Thanks for playing,’” says Prince, who notes that the industry is thankfully starting to evolve away from that rigid thinking by embracing new measurement criteria and setting consistent investment goals tied to DEI.
Consistency is especially important, Prince says. Supporting minority-owned media can’t be part of a box-ticking exercise. It has to be an ongoing priority; otherwise, it “leaves our partners in the lurch.”
“Being in it for the long haul [means] that you don’t just show up for the tentpole events – Black History Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month – and then not have a presence the rest of the year,” Prince says. “We really are trying to stay away from one-offs as much as possible.”
Also in this episode: Janet Jackson superfandom, why Dentsu Media limited its payment terms to 30 days for minority-owned publishers, the challenge of using programmatic to support diverse pubs and a few words of advice for young people of color thinking about a career in advertising.
