GroupM is spearheading a new initiative to help media companies prepare for and understand America’s new audience groups and demographics as the country becomes more diverse.
Speaking with Beet.TV during Advertising Week, GroupM president Gonzalo del Fa says the goal of the initiative was to re-engineer the conversation around multicultural advertising in the US. “Multicultural” and “minority” are in fact misnomers, says del Fa, when the country is shifting and people 18 and younger are now majority non-white in the US, and as of next year, 53 percent of American households will be of ethnic or mixed races.
So the initiative, dubbed New Majority Ready, aims to reflect that shift.
“We want our clients to understand this new reality and get prepared to talk to these audiences in a relevant and authentic way,” says del Fa.
With New Majority Ready, GroupM has established a coalition of media partners that the media agency will work with in helping them to navigate new audience groups as well as internal staffing practices that will go hand-in-hand with a more diverse audience strategy. At the start, GroupM is partnering with Disney, Viacom, Google, Meredith Corporation, NBCUniversal, Univision, Twitter and iHeartMedia. According to del Fa, GroupM wanted to partner with media companies in order to expand the initiative’s reach.
“If we join forces as a media agency who handles a lot of really important clients and bring aboard media partners with the audience and content, we can do a much better job,” he says.
At the core of the current New Majority Ready strategy is content packages that take high-visibility audience moments and turn them into bigger-reaching properties and conversations. Take the NFL for example, which del Fa says has considerable African American and Hispanic audiences: the plan is to create content that goes across platforms in order to have more impact specifically with these audiences, beyond commercial breaks.
Another goal of the initiative is to help companies get up to speed in hiring more diverse teams, a component that del Fa says is necessary if they want to get to the right place with diverse audiences.
“We want to help clients navigate these waters that we know isn’t easy, we know it’s new, but we can help them get to the right place,” says del Fa. “We want the clients to start thinking if they don’t have multicultural in mind, their businesses might be at risk.”
This video is part of a series of interviews conducted during Advertising Week New York, 2019. This series is co-production of Beet.TV and Advertising Week. The series is sponsored by Roundel, a Target company. Please see more videos from Advertising Week right here.