During a hackathon competition Wednesday night, Canadian marketers gathered to discuss tackling biases and assumptions that are baked into creative briefs in their industry.
The Account Planning Group of Canada (APG Canada) and People of Colour in Advertising & Marketing (POCAM) hosted the hackathon at George Brown College in Toronto titled “Beyond tropes, tokenism and talk.”
The event gathered teams of creatives, researchers, account managers, media analysts and strategists to present to a panel of judges and a live audience of their peers about how to re-imagine creative, research or media briefs in marketing to be more inclusive.
The contest pitted four teams of five – two teams focusing on creative briefs, as well as one working on media briefs and another focused on research briefs – against one another, with the media team (pictured) coming out victorious. The idea is for the presentations to be taken back to agencies to better inform their work, and APG and POCAM also plan to take the work of the four teams who participated in the Hackathon and find a way to make their briefs usable for any Canadian agency.
APG executive board member Michelle Lee tells strategy that the event was set up to move the industry’s work on DEI forward in a more tangible way. The idea is that, to really move the needle on this issue, a deeper examination of the fundamental tools that agencies use is needed.
“At the very extreme extent, in the worst examples, conversations around DE&I are still happening at the casting call, as opposed to much earlier on. So what can we do to shift this conversation and have it earlier?” Lee tells strategy.
After viewing the presentations, Lee pointed out that the issue doesn’t necessary start at the brief document and outline, but the process itself. She says there’s opportunity to interrogate what biases agencies and their clients are bringing into that process, while asking more probing questions among agency teams in their work.
“I think what people were so excited about was bringing a bunch of agencies and people together to work on a really hard problem that we’ve all been trying to grapple with, but while the demographics have changed, our briefings have not,” Lee says, adding that the event was the largest APG has ever organized.
POCAM steering committee member Gavin Barrett says he’s seen Canada change dramatically to become more multicultural since he arrived in the country in 1996. But the advertising industry, he notes, hasn’t kept up to change at the same pace.
“The industry has changed gradually, slowly, reluctantly in some cases with resistance. And it’s at every level,” Barrett says. “It’s in the way we recruit in focus groups. It’s in the allowance we make for other languages to be present in those rooms, for example. It’s the way we channel media investment and how little of it goes to multicultural or BIPOC-owned media.
“Our two biggest anglophone cities (Toronto and Vancouver) are majority racialized minority cities. Our industry has not evolved to celebrate that, to reflect that. We’re still seeing work that reflects a Canada from at least 20 years ago.”
Barrett adds that change can’t come through cosmetics or optics of inserting visual minorities into marketing materials – more fundamental work is needed, including uncomfortable conversations with teams and clients about who they’re trying to communicate with and who they’re not properly reaching in Canada.
Looking ahead, the two organizations encouraged participants and attendees to join and sponsor APG and POCAM, to commit to POCAM’s Call for Equity that promotes justice, equity and inclusion in the advertising industry for BIPOC professional, and to use the briefs and tools discussed in the event.
