How many of you here are afraid of having body odor? Raise your hand, you all are. How many of you wear deodorant? Well, that drive to wear deodorant and not be perceived as smelly to others, that is the work of some advertisers back in the 1920s who changed an entire culture around perceived cleanliness in order to sell deodorant. The ad industry is very good at getting us to buy things, and that’s in part because they’ve been using behavioral science to craft messages for a very long time. And yet, as communicators, we often have so little knowledge of how they’re so good at what they do, and that’s because they’re often dismissed as bad or as selling you things you don’t need. But I’m here to challenge that somewhat today, because no matter what you think about advertisers, we must all agree that they are extremely effective at changing behavior and even shifting culture. Essentially, they have created the most powerful toolbox for creating change. And if we adopt it, we have the opportunity to be even more effective at progressing social good. Now, at the Ad Council, we do just that. We are a nonprofit, but we’re structured more like an ad agency. And together with the top issue experts and the most creative minds from the ad industry, we produce work that changes lives on a mass scale. We’re evidence of what’s possible when we’re open to adopting practices from the ad industry. So today, I’m going to share three practices with you that as change makers, we all can and should adopt. And throughout, I’m going to show how we use these practices in the development of our campaign with the Gil Foundation called Beyond I Do, which aims to raise awareness that in the majority of states in this country, including the state we’re in right now, LGBTQ people still lack statewide protections from being fired, evicted, and denied basic accommodations and services. Here’s a quick look at one of our video ads. This is the story of Queen and Terrence. Queen is just my everything. Right now, I wouldn’t know where my life would be without her. They said, sure, Queen’s dead. It’s not Terrence. It’s a gentleman in an open store. It’s my duty. It’s my eyes. It’s knowledge. My landlord, he decided that he wanted me to move based on the fact that I was trans. It takes me to a place of no hope. It takes me to a place of loneliness. It saddens me when you’re discriminated against somebody in housing, where do these people go? Let’s just respect people in everyday life for just being human. So to get to where we did with that ad, we started with tip number one, which is to do your deep research. Advertisers spend billions of dollars every year to understand everything they can about their audience. And that’s beyond their demographics, their age, sex location. That’s to understand their psychographics, how they’re thinking and feeling and how that affects their behavior. For our campaign, we’re not preaching to the choir. Our target is a tough one, because it’s one that’s not fully comfortable around LGBTQ people. But the key is that they can be moved to have empathy for the discrimination LGBTQ people still face. So knowing that, we needed to know everything we could about them. What are their values? Who influences them? What does their environment look like? And what barriers do they face when it comes to doing what we’re asking them to do? Advertisers learn all this through exploratory research, where as much as possible, they observe and speak to their audiences in their natural environments. For Beyond I Do, we recruited people living in those discriminatory states to do in-depth journaling with us, as well as some interviews. But we also did all our desk research, and we talked to experts. We did social listening. And we took all of those findings and pulled them together to bring our audience to life in a persona that focused on those psychographics. So with that, I’m going to introduce you to this is Tammy. Tammy is a 52-year-old woman living in Ohio. She values faith and her family and feeling secure in her community. She’s not fully comfortable around LGBTQ people, but she knows God wants her to love others and leave judgment up to him. So she says she’s in the middle when she’s So she says she’s in the middle when it comes to things like LGBTQ rights. Plus she says now that LGBTQ people can get married, we’re all equal, right? She feels as long as everyone is free to live their lives and no one’s getting hurt, all’s right. Now, personas like Tammy, they humanize our audience in a way that simple demographics just don’t. And when we can have real empathy for the people we’re creating work for, we will create better work. So with Tammy in mind, we created a resource. It’s called beyondidoo.org. It features real stories of discrimination to really humanize this issue, but also includes all of the legal information for those discriminatory states so that she can get the facts. But we want to step further. We also created frequently asked questions pages. So as not to assume that she knows at this point, or even should know, what all of these terms and acronyms mean. And we integrated those right into the stories themselves in order to create teachable moments. Deeply understanding our audience allowed us to create this space that was safe for them to learn and to spark that feeling of, I never thought about this issue this way before. Now, tip number two is to meet them where they are. Advertisers have a very sophisticated understanding of the media we consume and how we consume it. And that’s because they can create brilliant work. But if it’s not getting in front of the right people, it fails. For our campaign, we involved a media strategist in our research and on our team from day one so that we could know ahead of time what type of work we needed to create and where we needed to place it. We learned from all our research they are, in fact, heavy digital users. So up front, we pursued pro bono partnerships with the biggest digital platforms they use, like Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook. But like a lot of people, they also watch a lot of TV. So we created those TV and video ads like the one you saw to run on channels that they watch. And also, we even secured a partnership with Fox to run an interactive version of our ads on their streaming services. Planning ahead, having a strong media strategy from the beginning, allowed us to make sure we were creating the right types of ads and putting them out in front of the right types of people meeting them where they are. Now, the third and final thing today I’m going to recommend is to be nimble and to iterate. This day and age, things in our environment are rapidly changing all the time. And we really need to be able to keep up, especially when we’re dealing with an audience who’s conflicted and who can be pushed back and forth on an issue. When we first conducted all of our research for Beyond I Do, we learned everything we could about how this audience views LGBTQ discrimination. But more recently, something happened that changed that. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled on Masterpiece Cake Shop versus the Colorado Civil Rights Commission. And you’ve probably saw it all over the media. However, the new sources where our audience is getting there, this story is likely the one pushing narratives around religious freedom. So we knew that we needed to revisit what we thought we knew about this audience, see if it’s still held true. So we engaged a very quick online testing platform just to get a pulse on what the new cultural environment was and how our audience was affected. And we learned very quickly that, yes, the cake baker case and arguments about religious freedom had captured their attention in ways it just hadn’t two to three years ago. So this had serious implications for our work. We knew that we had to focus on the most vital types of discrimination, because we would have trouble getting them to believe that it’s never OK to deny a couple of wedding cake because they’re gay. But we could get them to say, it is never OK to deny someone’s child medical care because that child has two moms. And it’s never OK to fire someone because he’s gay. It’s never OK to evict somebody because they’re transgender. That’s because these types of discrimination align with their values, like family, security. So it makes it harder for them to justify that type of discrimination. It is so important for us to be continuously evolving with our audience so that we can always find that most attainable small step for them to take. Now, something that my colleagues and I had even asked ourselves at the beginning of all this was, why should we be asking for small steps when we need big steps now? And a few years ago, we had spoke during our expert interviews with a man named Ken Melman. He is the former Republican National Committee Chair and openly gay man himself who did a lot of really important work for the marriage movement. And he said something that really resonated with us. To paraphrase, he said, one of the biggest mistakes advocates make is that they forget five years ago Obama wasn’t for marriage equality. And Clinton signed a law 20 years ago that limited gay rights. Everyone has evolved. So the notion that people should be admonished because they evolved at a different pace than others is just counterproductive. So going back to that question of why we should be accepting of small steps, it’s because we have so much to lose when we don’t. We risk pushing this audience in the opposite direction into the arms of an opposition who’s already fighting very hard for them. But when we demonstrate empathy and we show that we’re accepting of small steps, we have so much to gain because that is how you set them on the path to change. So I know I’m running a long time. So just very quickly a little bit about what the impact we’re seeing. This campaign, I’ll tell you, it’s very new. And we all know behavior change takes time. But I’ll show you a little bit about what we’re seeing so far. In a continuous tracking survey of this target audience in discriminatory states, we’re seeing more disagree that an employer and a doctor have the right to discriminate against an LGBT person. And these trends are even more pronounced among the general population in those 31 states. And that’s some progress in the real world. These practices here are things that advertisers do naturally. But we’re using them to create real world social change. And budgets aside, these are all things that we should be doing because they are vitally important, even if it means that we have to be a little scrappy with our methodology or with our resources. So that said, I challenge you to use these practices from the ad industry for good. Because if these practices can help advertisers sell generations of people deodorant, they can also help us make this world better. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.