Barrett and Welsh developed the “The brief is change the brief” campaign to create awareness of, invite participants to and sell tickets for the first ever APGxPOCAM Hackathon in 2024. 

Titled “Beyond Tropes, Tokenism and Talk”, POCAM (People of Colour In Advertising and Marketing) and the Account Planning Group of Canada teamed up to host this inaugural undertaking to further justice, equity and inclusion in Canadian advertising and marketing. Canadian advertising and marketing is characterized by performative work—tokenism—that focuses on winning awards and creating a self-aggrandizing feedback loop—talk. BIPOC Canadians are often an afterthought. Major diversity studies conducted by the ACA, ICA, CMA, APG, and POCAM, show that the industry is still white-led and white-dominated and is averse to being self-critical. This prevents change from within, and as a result, the work it does is increasingly irrelevant, relying heavily on white culture references—tropes—that are often meaningless in a Canada that has changed irrevocably over the last 20 years in terms of diversity.

“Change the brief” focused on the pivotal document of our trade: the brief. And it set the tone for the entire campaign with a provocative challenge: if the work isn’t doing the job, the brief isn’t doing the job.

“Toronto” was intended to startle and trigger our audience out of silence and into action. Using data from the most recent census, it made the point that Canada and the BIPOC Canadians who people it, deserve better than they are getting from Canadian advertising.

“Brief the change” highlighted the ironies inherent in Canadian advertising status quo and reminded us again that a 3rd of all Canadians are woefully underserved by our strategies and briefs.

“Yadda Yadda” reminded the industry that talking about DEI was not enough and that a professional DEI-informed change was needed at the most fundamental levels of Canadian advertising.

“Too White” used humour and a classic trope from detergent advertising to remind the industry that we are failing BIPOC Canadians when we fail to make our briefs truly inclusive.

POCAM

Click here to view the case video on Vimeo.

In terms of coverage, the Hackathon program and the event itself received valuable coverage from WARC, Strategy|Brunico, Campaign Canada and New Canadian Media.

We exceeded our participant sign-up target significantly, triggering a competitive review-and-selection process.
We had audience target of 80, and we hit our auditorium capacity of 100.

Most importantly, the output of the hackathon has been collated and made available for free as the industry’s first-ever Inclusive Brief Toolkit, available to download for free on the POCAM and APG Canadian websites.
Click here to view the case video on Vimeo.

To date, numerous agencies and institutions have drawn on this resource to inform their briefings.