The Visibility Brief: Open-Source Tool For Upping Representation In Advertising

By: Martin Agency CSO Elizabeth Paul

Our mission as an agency is to Fight Invisibility.

For the past 2+ years, that rallying cry has focused our efforts and united our people.

It’s a battle that has to be fought of multiple fronts.

The reality is 85% of ads are never seen. Most are somewhere between casually unnoticed and actively avoided—which feels like a waste of blood, sweat and billable hours. Our clients can’t afford to be invisible, and the world doesn’t need more wallpaper.

We also want people to feel seen. For too long our industry has failed to represent the lived experience of myriad groups in the cultural goods we create. We all have to do better.

Let’s Get To Work

While it will take all of us to fight invisibility—strategists have a unique role in this work.

We’re often asked to be the avatars of the consumer during the creative process. We sit in people’s living rooms and ride along on grocery store runs. We conduct interviews and administer surveys; we “listen” to social chatter and study cultural movements to both architect and inform the work.

In my career, I’ve had to become a passable expert on day traders, small business owners, sneakerheads and myriad other subcultures of which I am a student, but not a member. We are proxies—which becomes more precarious when you want to broaden the range of representation on the brief beyond your lived experience. Do you feel like a poser? You should.

One answer is to continue our efforts to diversify our ranks in every discipline, at every level and every agency. Another is to use the voice of the consumer whenever possible, allowing them to represent their own experience. Fewer Google searches in favor of face time (even if it’s virtual) with the people we seek to understand.

We also need to ask better questions—of ourselves and of world.

That’s why we created The Visibility Brief, an open-source tool designed to check bias blind spots and illuminate insights in a way that also broadens our perspectives and inspires more representative work. You’ll see we’ve included the start to a shared directory geared toward building visibility for all sorts of communities and movements.

We don’t have all the answers, and we may not even have all the questions. So, throw in your ideas and builds and pushes to make what we’ve started better.

This brief was not built in a bubble, nor is it the view of a single author. I enlisted Martin Senior Strategist and 2019 AdColor Future recipient, Helena Berhane, to be my partner in this work. We authored The Visibility Brief together—and already it’s been added to by agency leaders, peers and partners in mission who’ve helped make it stronger. We hope you’ll join us in this fight.