DEI

The ad tech industry is one of many on a long list of male-dominated fields. But the status of ad tech as just another brodeo is finally changing.

“You don’t have to know everything” as a DEI expert, said Femi Olu-Lafe, a 2022 Top Women honoree in the DEI Champions category. As Kinesso’s SVP of global culture and culture, Olu-Lafe stays curious and open to learning from others.

Brands that don’t invest in diverse media are missing out on revenue. “Audiences in those communities reward you for noticing them,” says Mark Walker, CEO of Direct Digital Holdings.

Brand safety’s detrimental impact on diverse, equitable and inclusive media goals is a question of automation gone wrong, ham-fisted implementation and industry leaders choosing the easy route, writes Charles Cantu, CEO and founder at Reset Digital. In this column, he reviews how brand safety’s DEI problem has developed and recommends steps advertisers, agencies and brand safety organizations can take to overcome it.

Multicultural markets are the single biggest growth opportunity for the media and advertising industry. At least according to Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, speaking at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) Masters of Marketing Summit in Orlando, Florida, this Wednesday. The industry needs to step up not just because it’s the right thing to do, he said, but because multicultural markets could be “the economic growth driver for decades to come.”

The marketing, publishing, advertising and communication industries have historically been on the cutting edge of diversity efforts with customers. Yet many continue to fall behind internally, writes Jeffrey L. Bowman, co-founder and CEO of Reframe.

Streaming has a Hispanic underrepresentation problem. Hispanic Americans account for nearly 20% of the US population, but Latino actors were cast in only 5.5% of the roles in digital programming during the 2019-2020 broadcast season. The representation gap is even wider in streaming TV than it is in broadcast, where Latino actors accounted for 6.3% of all roles.

A weekly comic strip from AdExchanger.com that highlights the digital advertising ecosystem…

The advertising industry is taking a few hits these days. Legislators are looking hard at treating ad platforms like utilities. Nefarious state actors have hacked our political discourse and even our understanding of facts. But this isn’t the first time the ad industry is facing choppy waters. The ad world is in desperate need of a new position: the Chief Morality Officer, writes Marilois Snowman, CEO and founder of Mediastruction.

Since 2020, brands have made commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in their ad campaigns and spending. In response, a number of ad networks have cropped up that specialize in connecting advertisers to diverse audiences via partnerships with minority-owned and minority-led publishers. My Code Founder and CEO Parker Morse believes the rise of multicultural ad networks over the past two years is great news for the advertising industry and for efforts to monetize minority-led publishers’ media inventory.