With advertising agencies ramping up investment and developing practices to improving diversity and inclusion within digital advertising, GroupM has unveiled the launched of a new multicultural marketplace with 300 vetted publishers.
The new marketplace represents a comprehensive and growing list of Black and Hispanic owned and/or focused publishers that create, curate and distribute content specifically for these audiences.
According to the release from GroupM, the Multicultural Marketplace will provide a singular, available-now, diverse and delivery-accountable marketplace media offering that ambitiously sees 100% of clients participating over the next 6-18 months.
The marketplace is also determined by GroupM’s proprietary 20-point eligibility criteria, clustered across five categories, including GroupM’s industry-recognized brand safety guidelines.
Analysis points include, but are not limited to, traffic & targeting capabilities, content relevancy and recency, privacy policies, ad rendering, clutter and ownership.
Accessible to clients, the Multicultural Marketplace provides critical support to independent publishers owned by and/or serving Black and Hispanic communities.
Additionally, it takes into account the following challenges faced by these publishers: financial under financial pressure with the consolidation of digital spending around giant platforms, levels of effectiveness and audience engagement of these publishers not recognised in marketplaces and often overlooked due to perceived complexities of buying them in a non-automated environment.
“These publishers provide essential voices and content to the Black and Hispanic communities and society and maintain the overall diversity health of the media marketplace. Our Multicultural Marketplace will allow clients to plan and buy Black and Hispanic owned or focused media in an automated way, including programmatically, directly and at scale,” said Gonzalo del Fa, president of GroupM Multicultural.
“At times, especially in a price-driven environment, media ‘value’ is distilled to efficiency alone, and audience engagement and content relationships may be overlooked. The current and future marketplace demands an accountable, accessible-now, and focused investment strategy that better balances efficiency, engagement and effectiveness in reaching the Black and Hispanic communities,” commented Susan Schiekofer, chief digital investment officer at GroupM.
“The GroupM Multicultural Marketplace is our mechanic to achieve greater equity, while supporting the voices, content and editorial written for, by and/or owned by these communities,” she concluded.