Inclusive Marketing: The Key to Connecting with Underserved Audiences | Matthew Tsang

David McBee: Hello, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, marketers, media buyers, and business owners. I am David McBee. Our guest today is Matthew Tsang, co-founder of AndHumanity, an integrated inclusive marketing and communication agency with the core purpose of serving people-first brands that want to leave a legacy of belonging. Over his 15-year career in marketing and communications, Matthew's work has been recognized in Marketing Magazine, Global American Marketing Association Conference, PR News, and more. Matthew speaks publicly on inclusive marketing, the Asian Canadian experience, and entrepreneurship. Matthew, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Matthew Tsang: Thanks for having me, David. David McBee: I'm so glad you're here. I want to start our conversation by chatting about AndHumanity's mission of serving people-first brands that want to leave a legacy of belonging. That's a very interesting concept. What does that mean? What inspired that mission? Matthew Tsang: Yeah, absolutely. I'll start with the belonging part first. Belonging for us is a really important term, especially in the media and advertising industry, which has historically excluded or under-targeted diverse communities. So although it's improving now, there's a long way to go before these underrepresented communities feel like they belong in the media sphere, like dominant cultures usually do. So what inspired this mission, to answer that question, was a multitude of things, but the brief version is my sister, who's my co-founder, came to me with this idea of an inclusive marketing communications agency. And at the time, she was pregnant with her first child. We had been running a traditional generalist marketing agency for about a decade at that time. So I'd been working for a while. And she just told me, "Now that I'm pregnant and thinking about the future of my children, I want to do something that has more lasting, meaningful impact." And now she has two kids. I have a kid myself. So we feel like we're creating a better world for them. David McBee: It had to have been interesting to just shape your focus into that one area. Did it cut off opportunities for you or did it open up new opportunities for you? Matthew Tsang: Well, I think it did a little bit of both. When we were working at ... It was called MyLoudSpeaker Marketing. When we were running that generalist traditional agency, we were mainly working with small businesses, nonprofits, charities, and mainly, you can say, insulated to where we're located in the Vancouver, BC area here in Canada. So a lot of the work that we're doing, it's not that we saturated the market there, but there are a lot of agencies here and a lot of agencies doing really good work here. So I would say that even though when we, I'd say, stopped committing as much time investing as much time in MyLoudSpeaker Marketing, we probably did lose some opportunities and some clients there. But we wanted to focus on AndHumanity, which opened up, I would say, way more many doors than we closed with MyLoudSpeaker Marketing that we can work with and have worked with mid-size, large-size global companies from all over the world beyond North America. So that's not something that we would have had the opportunity to without this kind of shift. David McBee: All right. So be honest with me, how important is integrated inclusion marketing to a business's brand? Is it just them being politically correct, or does it actually move the needle and sell product? Matthew Tsang: Yeah, so firstly, I'm not a big fan of everything being politicized, especially when I believe it comes to basic human rights and decency. On top of all that, iterating inclusion isn't actually just more imperative like you're asking here. It's a business case for marketers. I have the stats around, and I won't run through all of them, but diversity is increasing for all underserved communities, everything from people from the 2SLGBTQI+ community, so the rainbow community ... I think the statistics most recently were around 20% of the population in North America identify under this identity, whereas it was maybe 10% a decade ago. The senior community is growing. People with significant disability I believe are, I think, around 15% globally and hold about 14 trillion in spending power. So I would say that as much as it is a moral imperative, it's also a business case, because all these underserved communities that usually don't see themselves represented in the media sphere, meaning like Hollywood movies as well as marketing communications, these communities are growing. So regardless of what you believe, if you're a brand that doesn't focus on these underrepresented communities, you will inevitably fall behind. David McBee: Some really solid evidence to embrace this. I like that. Do you have an example of a client that you helped and maybe some of the results of that experience? Matthew Tsang: Yeah, absolutely. So we were promoting a new docu-series for this broadcast network. And we have a principle at our agency, a guiding principle. It's nothing about us without us, which is essentially as it sounds, anything that we create that is targeted or focused on an underrepresented community, we guarantee to have someone behind the camera, behind the lens, behind the strategy co-creating the work with us or creating the work if we have that specific lens in-house. So for this, we were able to showcase the power of why nothing about us without us is, again, not just a moral imperative, but also a business case. So for this specific project, rather than focusing on an overarching traditional trailer that would blanket across all demographics, which is usually what the client would do for something like this in terms of promoting a docu-series, we adhered to the principle of nothing about us without us. We also have another principle called telling deep stories rather than wide stories, which means digging into the deep cultural nuances of each of the underrepresented communities that were featured in this docu-series. And we included them in the co-creation of this marketing strategy and campaign. So we gathered all this information on the best channels to reach these specific demographics, the most effective key messages to promote this, a comprehensive media plan for advertising unique content to these unique audiences, all following nothing about us without us, meaning following folks that come from the community that were featured in this documentary, and asked them basically, "Hey, what's the best way to reach community and people with your lived experience and the best avenues," et cetera. So we co-created this marketing strategy. So the result of all of this is that the campaign, again, not just a moral imperative where they feel empowered to promote to their own community and be a part of this campaign, but it showed an incredible return on investment. It became one of the network's most viewed programs ever, of all time, above their usual popular drama series, et cetera. So another example of as much as I believe in the moral imperative wholeheartedly where people should feel like they belong in the media sphere and they should be represented accurately to what we see in the world, it also has a really strong business case. David McBee: That's a great story. What would you say to a brand that just really wants to target everyone? Matthew Tsang: Absolutely, and I think a lot of brands have, you can say, this desire to target everyone in a blanket statement. The way I would advise them is that that's totally fine that you want to target everyone. However, you need to cater your messaging and cater your brand or cater your products, cater what you're doing to specific underrepresented communities, because for example, one thing that I learned growing up ... I grew up traditionally learning about traditional marketing techniques and strategies, being a strategist myself. And a lot of the times it was like, let's look for universal values, universal values to attract the universal, you could say, in a widespread population or mainstream population. So it might be something like, let's hit on values like loyalty or bravery or something like that. But I can tell you firsthand that my lived experience is different than your lived experience. And for example, in my culture, my definition of loyalty or bravery or something that we assume is a universal value is going to have slight nuance and difference than what your definition is, just based on your lived experience and where you're from. So if you create a blanket statement or something that relies on universal values, you're actually excluding a lot of folks that have different lived experience than either the person creating it or outside the dominant culture. So I think traditionally, we as marketers have been taught that universal values exist, but what a lot of equity, diversity and inclusion principles and justice-based principles say is that there are actually no such things as universal values. So a lot of this, what I call good marketing, is just personalizing it for your clientele, personalizing it for your audiences in a way that's actually effective, that isn't being done as much as it should be. David McBee: Okay. Final question. If you have 30 seconds to just give advice to the agencies and brands that are watching now regarding inclusive marketing, what would that sound like? Matthew Tsang: Inclusive marketing is not a tactical-based approach to this work. Everything related to inclusion and integrating inclusion in marketing is principle-based. It's kind of like if you're trying to learn about a brand new subject, say something like SEO, you can't just do a checklist of things like write blog posts, blah, blah, blah, or whatever it may be: off-page, do these things; on-page, do these things. Just because you do this checklist of things, it doesn't mean you fully understand all the components of SEO. And that's how inclusion unfortunately is sometimes treated: "Oh, make sure you include all text in this image, or make sure you include image descriptions." That's a very tactical, checkboxy approach to integrating inclusion. If you want to truly, authentically integrate inclusion and resonate with underrepresented audiences, you have to take a principle-based approach to this work. David McBee: Great advice. All right, before I let you go, I do like to ask all my guests, do you have a podcast or a book that has been instrumental in your success? Matthew Tsang: So many to talk about, but I'll focus on Sonia Thompson's Inclusion and Marketing podcast. It's one I listen to consistently whenever I drive my daughter to daycare and pick her up or anything like that. It's my go-to. They're short episodes that you can usually ... I think under 30 minutes most of them. So I really like that podcast. We also have our own book co-written by my sister, my co-founder, along with other JEDI experts, called Authentically Inclusive Marketing. That can be found on our website. David McBee: JEDI Experts? Matthew Tsang: Yep, JEDI. Yeah. It wasn't because we're Star Wars fans or anything but equity, diversity, inclusion, and then the J in front of it is justice. So justice, equity, diversity, inclusion. Sorry, I didn't explain that before I said it. JEDI Experts. So as marketers, we love it because it encompasses justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. Justice is huge for us because we want to create systemic change, but we also love that it rolls off the tongue. Being marketers, being able to say JEDI Experts is fun. David McBee: That is awesome. All right, so what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Matthew Tsang: You can find out more about us at www.andhumanity.co, meaning A-N-D-H-U-M-A-N-I-T-Y.co. You can find everything there, from our book, to our social media profiles, and obviously our services, who we are, etc. David McBee: Perfect. Thank you so much for being my guest today, Matthew. Matthew Tsang: Thank you for having me. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching Simpli.fi TV. Please help us out with a like, a comment, a share, a review, and be sure to follow or subscribe to be informed about new episodes. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry-leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.