The Account Planning Group of Canada (APG) and People of Colour in Advertising and Marketing (POCAM) are partnering on a hackathon aimed at “reimagining” the strategist’s toolkit to ensure it’s more inclusive.
“Beyond tropes, tokenism and talk,” will take place at George Brown College’s Lakeshore Campus on April 24. The organizations have put out an open call for applicants who are either members of the BIPOC community or allies.
As a part of the APG’s mandate to promote strategic planning in Canada, the organization is mindful of building a community that resembles the consumers it engages with, which made POCAM a key partner for this initiative.
“The feeling is that there’s been a lot of conversation on this topic and a lot of different agencies are launching their own initiatives,” said Michelle Lee, freelance strategist and executive board member of the APG, “But this is the first time that we’re trying to bring together a number of different agencies to work on this problem together.”
Sponsoring agencies include Omnicom Media Group, WPP, Visionnaire, Publicis Groupe, The Trade Desk, Adapt Media, Believeco Partners, IPG Mediabrands, Barrett and Welsh, FUSE Create, and RISE Integrated Sports + Entertainment.
Roughly three teams of five participants will compete to reimagine a brief–either creative, consumer research, or media– to make it more inclusive of the BIPOC community. All competitors will be selected by the APG and POCAM, in order to ensure diverse, cross-functional teams. The objective is to incorporate a broad mix of experience levels, from aspiring industry professionals, to junior and senior-level employees across various disciplines.
“It feels like a lot of conversations around diversity and inclusion still happen at the casting call, as opposed to further upstream,” said Lee. “And so, being the APG, we asked ourselves, ‘what role could strategic planning play in helping to move these conversations earlier on?’ In conversation with POCAM, we realized that if we're going to push these conversations earlier on, we need to reassess the fundamentals of the strategic planners’ toolkit– those key tools being the creative brief, the media brief and the research brief.”
Teams will receive a virtual brief two weeks prior to the event and will use that time to reimagine the brief to make it more inclusive. Participants will also be provided with a tangible example on which to model their suggestions.
“For example, we might say to a team, ‘Think about the financial services industry. Think about how banks right now generally advertise to newcomers,’” explained Lee. “Help us, in your storytelling, identify all the tropes and the things that are wrong with the way that they advertise to newcomers. Tell us what's broken, and then tell us how you'd fix it. And in doing that, help us to identify what would be the implications on the brief.”
The hackathon briefs will follow a standard template, including sections dedicated to background, target audience, insight, and executional mandatories. “We want to have people think about how they might prompt for those responses within each of the templates,” said Lee. “If you take, for example, the creative brief, the target audience is the obvious place to start given the conversation around BIPOC, but even something like… different colours and signs and symbols can have very different interpretations, depending on which ethnic group you're from.”
On the day of the event, each team will be given 30 minutes to present their revised brief in front of a live audience and a jury, after which the jury will step away to deliberate, and announce the winning team. Tickets to the event are on sale now.
APG hopes to use insights derived from the hackathon as starting points to build a more inclusive community of strategists. “We have to actively adapt the status quo to see lasting changes in our industry in our commitment to inclusivity. This is one of those steps.” said POCAM Steering Committee member Aleena Mazhar Kuzma, in a release.
“Obviously we're not going to solve it with one hackathon, but it's a way to push the needle forward,” added Lee.
