Ebiquity PLC, the independent global marketing and media consultancy, and diversity media specialists DECA Media Consultancy, today announced a new partnership to help brands and agencies reach diverse audiences currently being missed by many campaigns.
The offering will combine Ebiquity’s storied experience of effective media and marketing strategy with DECA’s unique understanding of media consumption and attitudes across a range of audiences including BAME, disabled, and LGBTQ+.
Brands and agencies will get a genuinely holistic view of their media landscape, revealing the audiences they may have been missing in their media strategy and guidance on how to effectively reach them to drive better marketing outcomes.
In addition, DECA (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.
Martin Radford, Director, Ebiquity, said the 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.
It’s not as simple as casting diverse actors and thinking the job is done. We all need to examine and understand how sections of the population, who can be hard to reach through conventional media channels, can be reached.
To change, we all need an understanding of the different groups involved, their cultures, their consumption habits and their behaviours and DECA’s unrivalled expertise and insight into diversity and inclusion makes them our obvious partner.
Christopher Kenna, DECA CEO said:
Ebiquity are experts in giving clients a full picture of their current mainstream activity while DECA are experts in global diversity media and through our partnership we can give brands and agencies a true picture of their media across the whole of today’s society.
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.
He cited a 2019 ANA report which said 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.
Nationwide Building Society is the first client to sign-up to use the Ebiquity DECA partnership.
Chris Ladd, Head of Media at Nationwide, said the advertising industry was 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.
Featured in Mediatel.
