How Humanity Unity Is Bringing Diversity of Thought to Brand Transformation

The advertising and marketing industry has made great strides towards placing diversity and inclusivity near the top of its agenda. However, there's still a long way to go. That's why our agency Humanity has launched Unity, a team of advisors that brings diverse voices and perspectives to our strategy and creative work, and is designed to bring about positive change.

It's common for DEI initiatives to go as far as making sure the cast in a commercial is diverse. Humanity's ambition is to go beyond this, and truly transform the narrative, ensuring that this diversity is built into the stories that brands are telling, how they’re telling them, and who is doing that storytelling.

Unity takes leaders from a cross-section of communities who together act as an intellectual cultural resource to help inform and guide our brand transformation strategy and creative work through their lived experiences and their knowledge. At launch, Unity consists of nine members from various backgrounds and representing a wide number of communities and lived experiences.

These experts are: Dani Gomez-Ortega, global diversity, equity and inclusion leader; Dr. Ivan Joseph, VP at Wilfrid Laurier University; Jennifer Meness, PhD, assistant professor of Indigenous Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University; Julie Savaria M.Sc., MBA, founder and CEO at Masla Empathy Lab; Yumi Numata director of operations, Yellowhead Institute; Simone Wright, Shopper Insights Manager at Nestlé and founder of Parting the Roots; Brandon Meawasige, VP communications and marketing at Indspire; Don Amero, Canadian musician, author and podcaster; and Amy Knowles, SVP at Research Strategy Group Inc.

Telling relevant stories

Unity's inception builds on the principles behind the launch of Humanity three years ago. We founded the agency based on the view that brands can be something more, and should do something more, to help society beyond representing simply the products or services that they sell. We have built a diverse client roster across industries, but we don't always have the lived experience inhouse to speak to every community. To represent them in everything that we do.

It helps that we're an agency focused on brand transformation and that our approach is not only to understand what people think, but how they think. That's why we created our strategic Wellbeing Framework, which is underpinned by behavioural science and allows brands to connect to people in deeper, more meaningful ways by finding where a brand can realistically play a role in someone’s pursuit of wellbeing. 

The power of human insights

Unity really supports this approach because the idea is always to bring in the right people for the right projects. Recently, for instance, we are working on a brand refresh for a human rights client that needs to resonate not only with the general population but also needs core Indigenous representation and thinking. We were able to bring in a Unity advisor who is Indigenous and have them review what we'd pulled together, and then frame it with her world view and teaching to make it more relevant and more rooted in Indigenous thinking.

This emphasises the role that human insight and understanding continues to play in brand and marketing communications. It’s so essential to have someone from within the community providing an informed view. 

Looking forward, we're definitely looking to expand the community of advisors at Unity and inviting new humans who are involved with diversity and inclusion initiatives in their own communities. Some amazing things are happening within the creative and marketing community in Canada and we want to speak with people who can help Humanity to play a bigger part in that and transform the conversations brands have with their audiences.