Inclusive Advertising: What’s Holding the Industry Back?

Despite a strong desire across the industry to improve inclusion, the real-world results are lagging behind this sentiment. So what’s holding the industry back?

1. The industry itself is not diverse: The advertising industry — across the ecosystem and at all levels — is not representative, which is itself a barrier to creating representative and inclusive content. Only 19% of in-house and 23% of agency survey respondents reported that their leader almost always considers the demographic diversity of their team when developing content.
2. There is a lack of leadership mandate: Some organizations lack a clear mandate and active support from their leadership to create representative and inclusive content. Just 27% of survey respondents said they can tell that representation and inclusion are important to leadership at their organization because they have a formal process or mechanism in place to make sure content is representative.
3. Organizations have difficulty understanding long term benefits: Marketing organizations are better equipped to understand short-term costs and potential risks than they are to measure the positive impacts of representation and inclusion on long term business outcomes. 54% of survey respondents indicated that their leaders do not draw a connection between creating representative and inclusive content and company performance.
4. Agencies reacting to client direction: Without a strong mandate from their clients, agency leaders are sometimes not incentivized to invest in creating representative and inclusive content. However, 93% of agency survey respondents said they would be very receptive or receptive to additional guidance or tools around how to address representation and inclusion in advertising, showing the appetite for agencies to improve when provided a clear direction from clients.
5. There’s a lack of awareness of tools and resources: Individuals lack awareness of and access to the knowledge, skills, resources, and tools to create representative and inclusive content. Individuals are confident in their ability to create representative and inclusive content, but only if provided with adequate tools and resources. While we uncovered a number of tools across the advertising ecosystem, awareness and adoption of these tools is still relatively low. We also found that 68% of tools are designed to be used during production or later, when it may be too late to make meaningful changes to content; 18% are used after the campaign is already live.

We hope marketers will use this research to begin or continue conversations with their teams to learn what can be done to push past the barriers to creating inclusive ads. Click the button below to access the full research alongside thought starters from Deloitte on overcoming each obstacle and working toward a unified goal of more inclusive advertising.