Shaping the future of marketing: industry leaders rally for inclusivity at hackathon - New Canadian Media
Shilpashree Jagannathan
April 26, 2024
It is not uncommon for a newcomer to often hear the term “Canadian mosaic” when they move to Canada. This mosaic translated into reality on a sunny Thursday evening at George Brown College’s Waterfront Campus, as Toronto’s marketing and advertising professionals participated in a hackathon titled ‘Beyond Tropes, Tokenism and Talk’.
This event marked a step in the pursuit of inclusivity within marketing strategies. Organized by Account Planning Group (APG) and People Of Colour in Advertising and Marketing (POCAM), both not-for-profits, this event focused on enhancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the marketing and strategy spaces.
Amidst good food and drinks, attendees focused on reimagining everything from creative briefs to media strategies, aiming to inspire systemic change and foster more inclusive practices to mirror Canada’s dynamically changing demographic landscape.
Jessica Borges, Group VP Business Lead for Visionnaire, set the tone, saying, “Canada is the most diverse country in the world. I like to actually call ourselves a world within a country.” The idea that ‘DEI is not an afterthought’ became a recurring theme.
Michelle Lee, executive board member of APG, offered insight into how the hackathon came about. A few months back, APG and POCAM conceived an event focused on DEI. “To make a substantial impact, one must scrutinize the foundational tools of advertising development.”
The problem, as Lee indicated, often begins at the casting call. The goal of the competition was to move the discussions ‘upstream’, to ‘hack’ into the processes that happen before the casting call, in-line with Canada’s evolving demographics, where one in five people are born overseas and visible minorities are expected to represent up to 30% of the population by 2036, according to Statistics Canada.
The event was marked by a competition among four teams, consisting of advertising and media professionals, who were given a brief to reimagine what a more inclusive framework would look like. They were guided by clear goals: to identify what is broken, to envision the ideal, and to assess the implications for the brief. The four teams presented their briefs to the audience and a panel of judges.
By ensuring that diverse perspectives are not merely present but influential in the strategic discussions, “marketing to Canadians could be customized more genuinely, moving past surface-level tokenism to substantial representation,” said one of the presenters.
Besides calling for inclusivity at the strategy level, the participants also highlighted it for the creative process too, calling for a reinvention. Throughout the event, the participants created the “sense of urgency and a shared understanding that the shift towards an inclusive and representative marketing strategy is not just a moral imperative but also a strategic one.”
As Canada continues to evolve into a more ethnically diverse nation, the insights and frameworks developed from events like this could very well dictate the success of future marketing endeavours. “The hope is that the conversations started here will reverberate, leading to measurable progress and an industry that not only acknowledges but celebrates the multiplicity of Canadian identity,” said Justin Senior, co-founder of POCAM.
Shilpashree Jagannathan is a journalist from India. She now lives in Toronto and has worked as a business reporter for leading newspapers in India. She has tracked telecom, infrastructure, and real estate news developments and has produced podcast series. She currently focuses on human rights, feminist movements, and other related issues in Canada and  India. Her weekends are spent bird watching in one of the Toronto birding hotspots; she loves trails, biking, and a lot of sun.
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