ORLANDO–The Association of National Advertisers will expand its #SeeHer initiative globally in 2019 as it seeks to make the Gender Equality Measurement “the gold standard” for the depiction of girls and women across all types of media. What began in 2016 as an effort to more accurately portray females in advertising and content now encompasses 75 advertisers managing more than 1,000 brands, according to #SeeHer Chair Stephen Quinn.
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.
