BRiM

Introducing A new cross-industry collaboration to improve Black representation in marketing

The marketing industry lacks Black representation, particularly in management and leadership roles. One third of Black people believe their group is represented in a tokenistic way in the advertising that it creates.

As a result, marketing helps to perpetuate stereotypes and systemic bias. To tackle this, a group of the world's largest advertisers and agency partners, supported by an advisory panel of industry experts, have come together to create Black Representation In Marketing - or BRiM for short.

BRiM aims to harness the collective power of our industry to tackle the challenge of bringing more Black people into marketing and provide support systems to see them thrive. The focus of this cross-industry collaboration is to create meaningful change at every level within the industry, moving us all from good intentions to meaningful actions.

The first phase of the BRiM initiative is the launch of a framework which features principles, commitments, and easy-to-access and use tools to help each of us implement real change. The framework is free for anyone to access via the Advertising Association’s website.

The tools and principles included in it have been crowdsourced from across the industry, and aim to equip you, your clients and your partners with some simple steps to adopt to create real change and deliver fairer Black representation. 

An agency CEO, for example, might share it with department heads to enlighten and empower their organisation; a creative director could use it to foster a sustainable supply chain of diverse partners; or a media specialist might use it to help them check where their work shows up. 

By joining the BRiM community, people commit to an ongoing and measurable journey to educate themselves and improve Black representation in marketing for the long term.

Together, we can all bring about a positive change to create fairer Black representation in marketing.