Leo Burnett UK Launches Diversity Approach ‘The Everyone Way’

Leo Burnett is launching a new workstream for clients, in partnership with The Unmistakables and The Diversity Standards Collective, that provides expertise and guidance to help brands’ work become more inclusive.

The Everyone Way is a partnership with The Unmistakables, an award-winning strategic diversity, equity and inclusion consultancy and The Diversity Standards Collective, an agency that provides cultural insights and guidance.

The Everyone Way is an approach the whole agency will follow, with the help of curated experts at different points in a campaign’s development. 

The new workstream will provide workshops, creative development and PR advice to clients, leading to more inclusive and more successful brand marketing. Guidance will be given to clients on vision setting, strategic framing as well as both corporate representation and proactive risk management. The service can also provide clients with DE&I research, insight generation and a process for production to ensure casting is representative and inclusive.

Leo Burnett has started using this process with several clients, including McDonald’s.

Josh Bullmore, chief strategy officer at Leo Burnett UK, said, “Diversity and inclusion is an on-going journey for both us and our clients, and The Everyone Way utilises our partners’ expertise where we need it most. DE&I is on everyone’s agenda, but the pace of change just isn’t fast enough in advertising. We’re all learning how to improve on this: launching The Everyone Way is us putting our best foot forward.”

Shilpa Saul, client experience director at The Unmistakables, said, “If storytelling is at the heart of creativity, inclusion is the lifeblood that makes those stories live and breathe in a believable way. For the agency world to truly be inclusive, it needs to move beyond surface representation to a deep and nuanced understanding of the lived experiences of its clients’ customer base. We’ve seen time and time again how easy it is to create the optics of being diverse, equitable and inclusive. The Everyone Way partnership is focused on how we move beyond optics alone, to really embedding an inclusive way of thinking into the Leo Burnett culture and output to deliver even better creative work that remains relevant in an ever-evolving landscape.”

Sian Blackman, account director at The Diversity Standards Collective, said, “Taking a collaborative approach to diversity is one of the key reasons why The Diversity Standards Collective was set up, making sure that everyone, no matter their identity, is able to help create better representations of all communities in content. The Everyone Way partnership is a brilliant example of how three companies, with one unified goal, can take a new and collaborative approach to tackling the problem with diversity we have, and begin to make change at every step of the creative process.”