Media buyers who are not actively aware of their unconscious bias are lazy, as the industry tends to lean on cultural stereotypes to guide audience planning.
Media people are supposed to be audience experts, but when Sam Geer, MD at Initiative, and Chris Colter chief strategy officer at Initiative, did a quick fire quiz with the audience of MFA EX Sydney on the characteristics of Australians, the audience was lucky to get 50% right.
On stage at MFA EX Sydney, Sam Geer said: “It's really important to hold a mirror up to ourselves as an industry and individually because we all have unconscious bias.
“It's important to have these kinds of conversations in a public forum, as hard or not hard or as provocative as they may feel.”
Luisa Dalli, senior strategist at Havas Media and advisor for DE&I at Media Federation Australia, said: “Are we bad media buyers? Do we miss represent our cultures? I think we do.
“I think it's a very lazy aspect of media buying, just thinking that Chinese Australians are only on Weibo and not watching TV.
“I was reading the census data and it saw that 57% of Australians are first and second generation Australians. We are inherently a multicultural community, so our buying should represent that.
“What I'm not saying is that any one major publisher does not have a purpose - it's all about the context of the content.
“So are we showing the right content in the right context?
“What we don't want to do is across the year just change our creatives to something that's gold and red because that’s tokenism.
“And for us that’s a challenge with our clients.
“It’s up to us to question our clients and ask what's our actual purpose behind reaching this community? What does your brand have to do with reaching this community?
“Then together we can go about it the proper way.”
“Are we othering? If you're not actively being inclusive, you're actively excluding. So take action.”
Geer: “You can feel like you're damned if you do or you're damned if you don’t.
“I think exploring that territory, going deep into actually understanding what is going to have an impact and what's relevant for your client is really important.”
Joshua Green, strategy director at Spark Foundry and diversity, equity and inclusion advisory board member, said: “I think in an ideal world in Nirvana, we would address people purely based on behavioural data and everyone would be treated the same.
“But we know that that's not reality.
“And until that is a reality, I think we need to do as much work as we can to understand more diverse groups better.”
Sam Geer and Chris Colter on stage at MFA EX Sydney.
Geer: “It can feel really hopeless in topics like this, it can feel like how are we going to create change as an individual?
“But the good news is there is a cultural tipping point.
“If we can create advocacy and awareness as a media community in the broader Australian community and get ourselves to a cultural tipping point where 27% of the population knows about this and understands it we can create an accelerated adoption point that moves into the masses."
Chris Colter said: “Some active steps you can do is the SBS Inclusion training, we’ve got a 70% goal as an industry to complete the course and we're currently under 12%.
“That’s piss poor and we need to be better in that space.
“The DE&I council are also going to create inclusive media playbooks and workshops off the back of this to help us understand how we engage these audiences with nuance.”
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