Industry spotlight on diversity leads to strong growth for Brand Advance

Brand Advance, the first global diversity media network, has seen a surging demand for its services following agencies and brands pledge to tackle inequality within the industry.

Founded by Chris Kenna in 2019, Brand Advance has gone from strength to strength since launch with advertisers spending through the network increasing by 1438% in FY2020. The company saw its strongest growth in the UK, closely followed by the US, Germany, France and Spain. To meet accelerated advertiser demand, Brand Advance projects a further uptick in growth of 203% by the end of 2021.

In line with this momentum, Brand Advance today announces the launch of Brand Advance Creative – a new division focused on being an integral partner and specialist to creative agencies. Led by Daisy Rogers, Head of Content and Creative, the new arm will help creative agencies develop innovative content that is created by the community and demographic they are looking to target, making every campaign uniquely representative of its target audience. The new arm has already attracted projects with GSK, Dial Summit 3 and Brixton Finishing School.

Daisy Rogers, Head of Content & Creative said:

“Since launching Brand Advance we have gone from stride to stride and we are always looking to bring new innovative solutions to market. Having surveyed our clients, we realised there was a real need for creative projects to be developed by diverse producers and creators to truly engage audiences of diverse backgrounds, this led to the inception of Brand Advance Creative.”

Brand Advance Creative will be added to the network’s full suite of offerings, including DECA, its diversity media consultancy, Sentiment, its propriety media monitoring tool and Cultural Intelligence, a tool available to clients to inform their media planning and buying decisions.

With diverse groups significantly under-represented within the media, Brand Advance was created with a mission to help brands and agencies reach such groups in a meaningful and purposeful way. The company deploys a 7/10 rule whereby each campaign it handles is measured against a focus group that must provide a 70% approval rating before it can launch.

Over the course of the last year, Brand Advance has handled campaigns for HM Government on how Muslims can celebrate Ramadan in a Covid-19 safe manner and Kiehl’s campaign to launch a virtual celebration of Pride.

Brand Advance’s culture embodies its core diversity and inclusion values, with the makeup of its staff coming from a wide range of backgrounds – 43% are black, brown or multi-ethnic, 38% are female and 19% identify as LGBQT+. Similarly, its media consultancy agency DECA is represented by 40% black, brown, or multi-ethnic, 40% are females and 40% come from a LGBQT+ background.

Chris Kenna, CEO & Founder of Brand Advance said:

“We’re the only company helping brands reach diverse audiences authentically at scale. Brands and agencies haven’t been doing enough in their D&I efforts and following the events of last year it’s promising to see that they want to step up. We’re the specialists they’re coming to and we’ve achieved some amazing results in just a short space of time which is encouraging.

“We’ll look to strengthen the relationships we have with our agencies and clients and we have big plans to open new offices in a number of cities around the world, including New York, Berlin and Paris hopefully by the end of 2021”.

Brand Advance is a global, multi-channel diversity media network. We help brands reach diverse audiences across the globe with authenticity. Authenticity is key, which why our teams represent the audiences we aggregate through the network, across all channels. From strategy, to idea, to execution, our diversity network provides a springboard for our clients to reach, engage and commercialise many community audiences.