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Site Search ANA/4A’s Release Joint Set Of Industry Guidelines For Buying Diverse Media
As part of ongoing efforts to increase the amount of advertising and marketing spending marketers and agencies allocate to diverse media suppliers, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) this morning released a set of 11 new guidelines for their members to follow.
The guidelines, published in a joint ANA/4A’s report “Guidelines for Getting Started When Investing with Diverse Media Companies,” include these seven highlights:
- Find out if your company is already investing advertising and marketing dollars with diverse suppliers. If your company has a supplier diversity team (often part of the procurement function), that would be a great place to start to obtain that information regarding diverse suppliers.
- Get started with investing in diverse media suppliers that meet your company’s strategic communications goals. Don’t be overly concerned with the “appropriate” spending benchmark and look to increase investment over time. Think about allocating a percentage of your budget for diverse suppliers; otherwise, it’s easy to cut such spending first.
- Measure your market share, not just overall, but for each ethnic segment if possible. Understanding present business performance among these audiences will help identify growth opportunities.Then, gauge the size of that opportunity to understand the revenue potential of increasing that share.
- Look for opportunities beyond traditional media such as event sponsorships, experiential marketing, and product placement/integration, among others.
- To be authentic, invest throughout the year and not just during tentpole events like Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian New Year, and Pride Month. Investment in diverse media should be a core element of a company’s communications strategy to meet its diverse customer base.
- Some diverse media suppliers have expressed a strong interest in having direct dialogue with marketers. While agencies absolutely have key roles to play, marketers should be open to relationship building with diverse suppliers.
- Know the diversity make-up of your teams both internally and externally with your agencies. When marketing to an increasingly diverse America, those teams should ideally reflect the diversity of the consumers they are serving.
“Our earlier study clearly demonstrated that there are a significant number of marketers who want to invest in diverse media suppliers but need help getting started,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice explains in a statement released with the guide, adding: “These guidelines will help them develop a strong and substantive investment strategy that includes increases in diversity spending that reflect each company’s customer base.”