Bill Duggan

It’s an absolute landslide! Diversity has been chosen by ANA members as the ANA 2021 Marketing Word of the Year.

Supplier diversity has been a key focus of our work at ANA all year. In May we released "The Growth of Supplier Diversity" that provided a deep dive into supplier diversity in marketing/advertising from the marketer point of view -- covering benefits, challenges, spend, goals and measurement. Throughout the year we've regularly updated our "Certified Diverse Suppliers Resource List." In this new work ("And Now a Word from the Diverse Suppliers: The Supplier Perspective on Certification") we've flipped the process; rather than surveying marketers again, we surveyed the diverse suppliers on our resource list. The focus was on certification -- to understand its importance, benefits, challenges, ease/difficulty of the certification process and more.

The ANA/AIMM recently released, “A Diversity Report for the Advertising/Marketing Industry,” examining diversity in client-side marketing departments. The report comes with a significant headline – Finally, there has been progress in increasing ethnic diversity!

For the fourth consecutive year, ANA and AIMM (the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing) are releasing "A Diversity Report for the Advertising/Marketing Industry." The report examines both ethnic and gender diversity. Our headline is significant: Finally, there has been progress in increasing ethnic diversity in the advertising/marketing industry.

The ANA just held our Multicultural Marketing & Diversity Conference, presented by SXM Media. This was our 23rd annual conference, and my 22nd! Below are my takeaways for select sessions.

Do your client-agency agreements require your agency partners to disclose their use of related parties? To secure your permission prior to engaging affiliates? To document how those affiliates are compensated?

The ANA Brand Masters Conference, presented by Twitter, just wrapped. This year’s theme was “inspirational branding” and below are some inspirational takeaways from conference speakers.

Connected TV is exploding! There are approximately 75 million unique, addressable CTV households in the U.S. (out of an approximate total of 128 million). Per the latest estimates from eMarketer, CTV ad spending in the U.S. will be over $13 billion this year, and then more than double that amount by 2025.

Shenan Reed, Senior Vice President, Head of Media at L'Oréal, recently spoke at the ANA Media Conference on the power of advertising to be a service to the customer. To follow up on her presentation, group EVP Bill Duggan sat down with Reed for an interview.

The ANA Media Leadership Growth Council was recently established to be a direct counterpart to the CMO Growth Council, with an exclusive focus on media. The group is currently working to establish its growth agenda, and measurement will certainly be an important part of that.

To assist in the development of an equitable supply chain for marketing/advertising investments, ANA and AIMM have released an updated list of “Certified Diverse Suppliers for Marketing and Advertising” and a companion resource, “Suppliers Serving Predominately Multicultural and Diverse Audiences for Marketing and Advertising, Non-Minority Owned and/or Non-Minority Certified.”