The goal of SeeHer is to increase the percentage of accurate portrayals of women and girls in US advertising.

McHugh says marketers have are facing a unique moment as that viewers will be watching with a heightened awareness as to what space brands are taking at this particular time.

“One of the conversations that we always have is around the importance of how brands show up, especially in times like this,” McHugh says. “Consumers are always watching.”

SeeHer’s research explores how consumers feel about brands representing things like diversity, but now, in particular, brands are being closely watched for where and how they are marketing during this particular moment.

“I think [consumers] are counting on brands, especially established brands, to lead the way,” McHugh says.

With the NewFronts approaching, another topic that hasn’t been buried as a result of COVID is the rapid evolution of streaming platforms. According to McHugh, it’s still all about where the consumer is.

“From what I understand, video consumption patterns continue to change and migrate,” McHugh says. “I think we’ve seen an increase in video consumption through this entire situation that we’re all in.”

Consumers have adapted faster during this situation because they have the time and access to explore more than they would in their normal routines. The question is, will these new habits stick once COVID has come and passed.

“I guess the proof will be in the pudding when everyone goes back, one day, to whatever normal looks like,” McHugh says.

This video is a preview in a series leading up to the 2020 IAB NewFronts.   Please visit this page for additional segments from the Road to the NewFronts 2020.  This Beet.TV series is presented by the IAB. 

“Because we do believe that the need to depict women positively is not just incumbent on our female focused brands, but it’s important that all of our brands show up in the right way.”

Launched by the Association of National Advertisers in 2016, #SeeHer and GEM have prompted “a heightened level of awareness and much more sincere conversations around the quality of our communications,” Dilley explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

Dilley, who is responsible for PepsiCo’s Better For You & Premium Brands, says that shoppers are basing their brand decisions in part on strong diversity messages and positive depictions of females. Moreover, diversity pays dividends.

“Those businesses that are invested in diversity perform better, and the statistics show that now,” she says. “I think also we know that the GEM score drives better business results, so that’s incredibly important, particularly when you’re speaking to the finance director.”

Dilley has found that GEM helps PepsiCo have wider communications about the depiction of females in its communications. It can also act as a prompt to “get the right message across” and avoid making mistakes.

In addition, #SeeHer has fostered more constructive collaborations with the company’s agency partners. “In the last few months, I’ve been personally involved with a number of my brands and as we’ve developed new creative starting off with the conversation that #SeeHer has enabled us to have and putting that front and foremost as a critical factor of success within creative development,” Dilley says.

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

“The CMO Growth Council was formed to focus on marketing taking back control and leading disruption because marketing is being disrupted completely but taking control to lead disruption to drive growth,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s Masters of Marketing conference. “Because there’s not enough growth.”

Earlier this year, the ANA Masters Circle got together with 25 CMOs in Cannes and focused on five areas that are perceived to have the greatest opportunity to drive more growth. They are data and technology, customer centricity, brand experience and innovation, talent and capability, and society and sustainability.

“We spent the last couple of days with 200 CMO’s going through what the 25 CMO’s had come up with over the past few months and identified several areas that looked of great interest to us to really advance growth,” says Pritchard. “Data and technology is clearly one of the big ones, because mass marketing is being disrupted and everyone is reinventing media and reinventing advertising for that matter.”

As a result, CMO’s need to know about data management platforms, analytics capabilities, algorithms and related areas.

“What the CMO’s decided is that this is something we really have to just transform from an industry standpoint,” Pritchard explains. “And what we talked about was committing to creating what’s essentially an ANA marketing university that would bring all the best minds together through the ANA to be able to create the capability industrywide to transform our industry.”

He says that ANA CEO Bob Liodice made a big commitment “on the spot to make that happen.” Moreover, Pritchard asked whether CMO’s would be willing to serve as adjunct professors “and a bunch of hands went up.”

Another subject of great interest to the CMOs concerns customer centricity and brand experience and innovation so that brands can create relevant experiences across all consumer touchpoints. “Every single one of us was talking about how we’re using lean startup and lean innovation capabilities to be able to do fast cycle iterations in very small groups to be able to create ideas and get them out in the market much more quickly,” Pritchard says.

He is especially passionate about society and sustainability to be a force for good and a force for growth. “We invited everyone join #SeeHer, join the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, join Free The Bid so you can get equality behind the camera. And then we also introduced an idea of joining #Brands For Good,” one of whose efforts is to recognize brands that try to reduce plastic consumption.

This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.

In this interview with Beet.TV earlier this week at the ANA’s Masters of Marketing conference, Quinn discusses the year ahead and the importance of Meredith Corporation’s adoption of #SeeHer across its digital and print content.

Advertisers that are using GEM scores based on consumer surveys about advertising and content are “using that spend and the influence that they have for the good of their businesses as well as for the good of society. The initiative started as a business initiative, it’s all about growth,” Quinn says.

As #SeeHer has built momentum, business cases were developed showing the impact that GEM scores can have on sales and other ROI metrics. The ANA now has GEM metrics on how females have been depicted in some 600 television shows.

“What’s really exciting that Meredith has done is they’re the first publisher ever to apply GEM scores to their own content,” Quinn says. “The reason that’s important for advertisers is that we’ve proven the business case that when you have a strong GEM-scoring ad and you put it adjacent to strong GEM content, that’s how you get the synergistic affect on your sales and your return on investment.”

Quinn believes advertisers will be “really open to the idea that now Meredith is able to put strong GEM advertising into their books and their other content in a way that’s really accretive to the whole equation of gender equality.”

Asked for a male’s perspective on the #SeeHer movement, Quinn cites gender inclusion as a key component. “For this initiative to be successful, we need everybody to be involved in this. It’s something that’s a real opportunity overall for the whole content creation industry.”

Over the next 12 months, he sees three main priorities, starting with getting more marketers involved. “We talk about that as democratizing #SeeHer. Let’s get every ANA member, for example, involved in #SeeHer.”

Second is the ANA’s response to “a huge demand to take it globally, and so we are in the process of doing that and it will be available globally in 2019 because many of our marketers are obviously operating in multiple countries.”

Finally, “We need GEM to become much more prevalent in the content world. We’ve got an opportunity for GEM to become really the gold standard measurement across all content.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

In addition to #SeeHer, Georgia-Pacific has its own program to promote gender equality in advertising and media called Strength Has No Gender for its Brawny brand, CMO Douwe Bergsma explains in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s Masters of Marketing conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

“While we were looking at talent through separate efforts, all of a sudden we got a lot of feedback especially from young women that were joining Georgia-Pacific” who had seen the company’s presentations at universities and conferences, “which became a motivator for them to join the company,” says Bergsma. “We heard the same stories from our agencies where some of the top female creatives wanted to work on our business because of the way we embraced #SeeHer. So there was an indirect benefit where we all are challenged with recruiting the best talent that unexpectedly, because of our position and because of our activities, a lot of female talent gravitated to our organization and stayed.”

The #SeeHer GEM metric uses consumer surveys to identify best-in-class advertising and programming that supports girls and women. The ANA rolled out #SeeHer in 2016.

Georgia-Pacific began by using GEM data to inform its advertising creative and expanded to using it in its packaging. “Our Sparkle packaging is fully developed with the help of GEM scores to identify how our fairy should look like on-pack,” says Bergsma.

In addition, the company has used GEM scores “to qualify most of our communication content, especially our TV ads, we make sure that everything has a positive GEM score when relevant.”

Another benefit of #SeeHer has been “It’s extremely motivating for our employees and the agencies we work with.”

Bergsma believes there’s much more unconscious bias in society than people might think. He points to himself as an example.

“Through #SeeHer and GEM, I actually caught myself in some unconscious bias while I thought I was doing pretty well” based on positive scores related to Brawny paper towels but not for Sparkle. “If that’s true for somebody that’s actually involved, I’m sure it’s true for all of those involved but especially those that are not involved.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

“Demand it from your agencies, demand it from your media partners, and threaten to withhold the dollars unless they fulfill that demand, because that’s how the world works,” says the President of TBWA\Chiat\Day NY. “It’s powered entirely by money.”

One of the more widely known industry efforts for accurate portrayals of girls and women in advertising and media is the #SeeHer movement started by the Association of National Advertisers in 2016, the same year Reyes started at TBWA\Chiat\ Day NY. In this interview with Beet.TV, Reyes talks about the need for female influence in the creative process and the agency’s Circle of Women mentoring program that Reyes has spearheaded.

“In marketing, media and advertising we pride ourselves on being a microcosm of the larger world,” Reyes says. “And we can’t pride ourselves on being that microcosm if we actually don’t reflect what the real world looks like. So without that woman’s voice in the creative process or any part of the process, we’re not really being genuine to the mission we have.”

That necessitates not only mentoring younger talent at agencies but looking for different kinds of talent in places agencies have overlooked, according to Reyes, who rose from Managing Director to President of TBWA\Chiat\Day NY in July of this year.

“I don’t think that women, I don’t think women of color, I don’t think they’re all hiding in some secret place that we all haven’t found,” says Reyes. “I think they’re probably right in front of us the entire time but we have to grow them and nurture them and develop them in ways that we haven’t really been doing in the past.”

Going a step further, Reyes advocates “over-hiring” such prospects “because we have to correct the system. In over-hiring, I think if we can mentor these folks and develop them, then we will even it out in a better way.”

The agency’s Circle of Women initiative began after executives asked female employees what they needed and how they felt about being a woman in the business. “Their main feelings were around a lack of voice, a lack of presence and a lack of confidence,” Reyes says.

Circle of Women identified 17 women “on the cusp of leadership” and gave them free executive coaching. In return they were asked to mentor two to three women underneath them “so that in that way we would constantly create this everlasting pipeline of female leaders. The most important thing for me is more than half of the 17 are women of color.”

As for demanding more inclusion from companies with which agencies work, Reyes says, “we have to put our money where our mouth is on the topic.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

“We’ve been actively supporting #SeeHer for the past year and a half,” during which time AmEx “got to know a lot of the best practices in understanding gender bias,” Hamilton adds in this interview with Beet.TV.

The Association of National Advertisers launched #SeeHer in 2016 as an outgrowth of its Alliance for Family Entertainment’s drive for more family friendly TV programming. #SeeHer’s goal is to more accurately portray all girls and women in media by 2020.

AmEx has used the data-tracking GEM to identify best-in-class advertising and programming that supports girls and women so that it could “more accurately portray women and move them into hero positions in our messaging,” Hamilton explains.

Within the company’s most recent campaign, AmEx focused on how it could use GEM “as an additional measure to” achieve greater breakthrough and effectiveness.

“The increased focus on gender equality and diversity of thinking and perspective as we work on our messaging and advertising is really critical,” says Hamilton. “We’ve long embraced diversity and inclusion but I think really focusing on women in particular in that has been an important area of focus for us.”

Asked how to communicate to creative teams the value of diversity, she says that in a data-driven organization, “certainly case studies are really effective when you can tangibly show the impact of pulling diversity into our messaging or accurately portraying women and the impact that can have on our overall effectiveness.

“It’s very easy to get people engaged and excited about that. Featuring best practices and really effective case studies was a helpful way to bring additional focus to the need.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

By that she means she doesn’t feel obligated to talk about women who represent a given cause or movement, Brown explains in this interview with Beet.TV.

“I want to be like, ‘this woman is an amazing artist or astronaut or immigration lawyer.’ I tell the story of the woman, and then the woman happens to represent something broader.”

Meredith’s digital and print brands are the first to undergo certification for the #SeeHer initiative started by the Association of National Advertisers in 2016. #SeeHer’s goal is to more accurately portray all girls and women in media by 2020.

Whether it’s women taking care of immigrant children, fighting sexual discrimination or exploring space, “I go at it from ‘here is Jenny and this is Jenny’s story. Jenny is married or Jenny is single.’ I always focus on one particular woman and her story, because behind that story is something to support,” says Brown.

By way of example she cites a recent InStyle story about lawyers from the RAICES organization helping children who were separated from their parents while crossing the U.S. border. “Here’s five women from RAICES. Here’s how you can donate to RAICES. But I always put the woman first because she has a character and a story and a life and I’m a storyteller.”

In an age when there is no shortage of social causes, too much is not necessarily a good thing, according to Brown. It just produces exhaustion.

“We’re exhausted by hashtags, we’re exhausted by movements, we’re exhausted by pro Trump, anti Trump, wear this T-shirt, it’s national this day, it’s this walkout day, it’s everything else. I can’t handle it. I’m overwhelmed by it. So imagine everybody else when it’s just noise and we can’t just keep contributing to the noise.”

Following the “hideousness” surrounding the recent Supreme Court nomination process, Brown interviewed feminist and human-rights activist Gloria Steinem and discussed how today’s “female resistance” mirrors that of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

“I go at it from, ‘here’s this woman who is magnificent, here’s a perception she has on something. You want support her? Great.’”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

In 2017, Kellogg became involved with the #SeeHer initiative of the Association of National Advertisers, starting with its Special K brand. The ANA launched #SeeHer in the summer of 2016 to encourage a more accurate portrayal of all girls and women in media, as Advertising Age reports.

“What I’m really proud of is beyond Special K we have embedded the #SeeHer thinking across all the brands within Kellogg and have really embraced the #SeeHer principles to influence all of our marketing,” Crouch says.

During Advertising Week 2018 in New York City earlier this month, Kellogg announced that it had submitted its Special K “Own It” campaign to be evaluated with the ANA’s Gender Equality Measure (GEM) score, which is used to quantify consumer reaction to the treatment of women in advertising and programming. IRI then leveraged its IRI Lift solution to uncover correlations between the Kellogg advertisements’ GEM scores and offline sales lift.

Just knowing that Special K ads scored very well with its GEM scores was “a huge step in really validating and understanding how we were going to market as a brand and building our capabilities as a creative team,” Crouch explains.

The IRI research showed that Special K ads with the highest sales lift had the highest GEM scores, whereas ads that generated the lowest sales lift had the lowest. Moreover, the highest sales lift occurred when advertisements appeared during commercial breaks of TV shows with above-average GEM scores.

“We’re really seeing that brands that take a distinct point of view on reflecting the vales of a huge segment of our population, we’re connecting our brand benefits to the values of consumers much more effectively than we have in the past,” says Crouch. “So we’re thrilled to say that when we have high-testing GEM scores, we’ve seen a significant increase in our brand sales.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

Zalis partnered with the ANA’s Alliance for Family Entertainment in 2016 to launch #SeeHer to increase the accurate portrayal of women and girls in advertising and media by 20% by 2020, the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. The #SeeHer Gender Equality Measure module measures ads and programming in the form of a GEM score.

With more than 40 major national advertisers as members, #SeeHer “making a conscious effort now from a creative perspective as well as from media distribution and media placement to be better and to consciously as we think about content make it reflective of who we are today,” Zalis says in this interview with Beet.TV.

Zalis made the transition from market research to the business of equality when she launched The Female Quotient in 2015, of which she is CEO, to advance gender equality in the workplace through collaboration, activating solutions for change and creating measurements for accountability. Residing within The Female Quotient is Girls’ Lounge, which Zalis started in 2013.

As originally executed, GEM asked survey respondents four questions:

• What is the overall opinion of the female presented?

• Is she portrayed respectfully?

• Is she depicted inappropriately?

• Is she seen as a positive role model for women and girls?

Referring to #SeeHer’s GEM score, Zalis says, “Let’s create GEMs, let’s celebrate GEMs, let’s really work hard toward doing more and more of them.”

Beyond gauging viewers’ perceptions, GEM correlates high-scoring ads with advertisers’ campaign results. “We now can prove the business case for when you have high scoring ads with GEM, you also will produce more sales in the marketplace,” Zalis says.

Referring to recent IRI research results from beta testing with Kellogg and its GEM scores, Zalis says the results “are really nothing shy of remarkable. Money does talk. It’s not just the right thing to do for social good, but it also is the right thing to do if you want to see your business grow.”

She then identifies GEM five traditional ad performance metrics—purchase intent, recall, persuasion, relevance and likability—before adding a sixth. “Now we have a measure for equality called GEM.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.

The ANA launched #SeeHer in the summer of 2016 as an outgrowth of its Alliance for Family Entertainment’s drive for more family friendly TV programming. #SeeHer’s goal is to more accurately portray all girls and women in media.

“#SeeHer has made the importance of gender equality and diversity come to light in our space,” says McHugh.

When the ANA polled people about next steps beyond family friendly programming, they cited a lack of positive female role models. “Because they looked at the content that was out there and it wasn’t showing women in leadership positions. It was showing women waiting for their kids to get home from school reading a magazine, which, by the way is unrealistic because even if you’re home you’re working very, very hard with your children doing lots of things.”

Men are not left out of the picture. “It was about putting more positive portrayals of women and men in different roles,” she adds. “There’s lots of men I know, great men, who stay home with their kids also. It’s a family choice.”

The #SeeHer initiative has created more awareness in advertising and media about what needs to be done from both a marketing message standpoint and appropriate programming, according to McHugh. It uses a data-tracking Gender Equality Measure (GEM) to identify best-in-class advertising and programming that supports girls and women, according to the ANA’s news release.

All of L’Oreal’s commercials are rated as the result of consumers being asked several questions. “It’s not a shaming game for marketers and it’s not publicized, but it’s something that’s used to learn so that you can celebrate the successes and learn from moving forward as you create content and also so that you can learn from your mistakes moving forward and course correct.”

McHugh says marketers took a stand in the beginning of #SeeHer “and sort of drew a line” by telling its agency partners to only buy programs with high GEM rankings. That line included the proviso, “We don’t want to pay extra for this because this should really be the way of the world.”

You are watching Gender Equality Means Business, a Beet.TV series presented by Meredith Corporation in partnership with #SeeHer. For additional videos from the series, please visit this page.