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.

Whereas the AFE had previously focused on the quality of family entertainment overall, “This year we’ve really focused on #SeeHer, which is all about the accurate portrayal of women and girls in media,” Quinn says during a break at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

According to Quinn, data show that the vast majority of parents are dissatisfied with the content that’s available for families to view, and the number one issue within that is the portrayal of women and girls. “They believe it’s either negative or is not representative of the diversity that actually exists in families and society at large,” Quinn says.

This can take the form of unconscious bias, poor representation of women, or basically ignoring them. “That’s particularly why it’s called #SeeHer,” Quinn adds.

It’s not just about promoting gender equality per se. The AFE believes that companies will achiever greater ROI for their marketing spend in doing so.

On the eve of the Masters of Marketing event, Quinn shared proprietary new data with the ANA board of directors showing that removing conscious or unconscious gender bias from advertising increases purchase intent by more than 26% for all consumers and more than 45% among women. This is why the ANA and AFE hope their Gender Equality Metric, which is fueled by ongoing research, will become the industry standard.

Scores from the new metric will be presented to #SeeHer members quarterly to track progress and help the movement to reach its goal: a 20% increase in the accurate portrayal of women and girls in media by 2020.

On a broader palette, Quinn sees fruit in the labors of the ANA’s Marketing2020 initiative, kicked off in 2014 to help its members determine how to best align marketing strategy, structure, and capabilities for business growth. One of the big takeaways was the importance of “purposeful positioning” for brands.

“Even today I’ve seen so many examples on the screen here of brands that have taken on incredible things from a storytelling standpoint, values of the culture, that really adds an additional layer of purpose to the brand,” says Quinn. “The thing that I’m seeing this year especially is the need for the industry, the marketing profession, to be seen as doing something good and valuable to society.”

We interviewed him at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.