'Culture is our number one export': How an Atlanta-based marketing collective is pushing for tangible diversity gains

The A Pledge, an Atlanta-based coalition, is working to make tangible headway to improve diversity in marketing and advertising. As it is, Black and African American employees make up 5.8% of the industry, according to the 4A’s. “Can we create a system of opportunity? And to create the system of opportunity, we have to have an ecosystem around it,” said Darryl Cobbin, a board member of The A Pledge and managing partner at Brand Positioning Doctors consulting firm. Read more below.

• After a year of protests and calls for radical change in the name of George Floyd, a collective of Atlanta marketing and advertising professionals is calling on the industry to put its money where its mouth is.
• For Digiday+ members, as ad dollars move from TV to streaming, ad buyers are prioritizing platforms and publishers pitching TV-quality programming primarily watched on TV screens.
• It’s been a week since iOS users started receiving notifications that they could turn off cross-app tracking and unsurprisingly it’s difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions so far.
• Pet adoption became a go-to coping mechanism during the pandemic. Now more employers are allowing staff to bring their pets to work once offices return, in recognition of their benefit to mental health and to stave off separation anxiety.
• Shoppable video opportunities from Conde Nast, YouTube and Verizon Media — as well as star-powered content and contextual and identity ad targeting solutions — were the hot topics of NewFronts Day 2.
• This is only the second time that these Hearst titles have been leveraged together for a joint program and sponsorship opportunity at this scale.
• The Scroll acquisition announced yesterday marks the third consumer revenue-focused move Twitter has made this year.