Establishing AN inclusive marketing practice
Marketing has incredible power to normalize culture, and with that power comes responsibility. Thus, Sam Haskin, Adam Wright and myself started a grassroots movement to understand how Media.Monks could be more responsible marketers. We quickly learned that our clients wanted to join us on the journey, and in 2020, we officially launched the Media.Monks Inclusive Marketing practice. We developed service offerings for clients – conducting creative audits, setting DEI brand standards, and establishing governance processes. We made sure not to forget our internal team – developing agency-wide trainings and resources, and holding office hours to advise on creative WIP.
Representative audit slide
MediaMonk’s expertise and deep commitment to diversity make them an invaluable partner on our journey. They’ve worked with us to assess our strengths and opportunities and are now helping us build out our plans and systems to ensure Inclusive Marketing is something embedded in everything we do.
Thomas Ranese | Chief Marketing Officer, Uber
Creative audits
Leading the charge to proactively improve representation in my own team’s Google creative, I developed a process that leverages a diverse panel to review a body of client work against quantitative and qualitative criteria, and then provide recommendations. My Google Ads clients were thrilled with my proactive approach, and positive improvement in ads creative was tracked quarterly.
Other clients became interested in this invaluable tool and audits became our most popular inclusive marketing client service, generating $300K+ our first year. I outlined the process in an article published in AdAge, also on the Media.Monks blog.
Practical Guide to Inclusive Marketing
There’s a lot of good intent around inclusivity but we couldn’t find a single, comprehensive resource of info that marketers could turn to. So we created one and shared it with the world. This was a labor of love for a volunteer team who researched, wrote, and designed the website on their own time. I co-led the project, wrote drafts, fact checked, reviewed, and added insights. Once launched, this passion project attracted new client leads and attention from the Association of National Advertisers, amongst others. Be sure to check out inclusivecreative.monks.info for yourself.
Unfortunately the website is being migrated and may be unavailable. Content can be viewed as static pages. There is also web archive version of the site, although it is not an ideal experience.
Google partnership
My leadership in this space led to multiple additional projects with Google. Our audits uncovered the need for more diverse image assets and I guided creation of hundreds of new authentic character illustrations that made customers feel seen.
I also crafted an actionable tip sheet to help Google marketers evaluate creative through an inclusivity lens that was endorsed by Google’s CMO, Lorraine Twohill.
They've helped us gauge our strengths and areas to focus on, and have developed assets and resources that we now use broadly across our marketing organization. Their partnership in the space has been invaluable and continues to have an impact.
David O'Donovan | Head of Creative, Google Global SMB Marketing