Wild Card

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Businesses

     Back in 2020 when most of the world got sent home due to a Covid-19 surge, an innocent man, George Floyd was killed by a police officer which sent the American world up in flames. This protest was the straw that broke the camel's back and many protests took place all around the country. In light of these protests, many businesses used these moments to establish their alliance with minority communities and issue statements across many different platforms. Additionally many businesses decided to implement diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives within their business to further establish how they don’t tolerate discrimination and want to make sure everyone within their business feel included, heard, understood, and have their needs met. 

     One field of business that still needs to improve how they attack diversity and equity is the media and entertainment field. Weforum dicusesses in an article how media and entertainment companies need to work to actually initiate diversity and equity pursuits instead of just saying that they are initiating diversity and equity pursuits. Many businesses were judged harshly following the death of George Floyd because they were failing to issue statements or failing to act on the matter at all. Many media companies did issue out messages but what this did was place more focus on businesses and what they were actually doing to try and implement diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives rather than just what the businesses are saying. While showing sympathy and empathy to those affected does offer some relief to the pain, what really matters is how businesses are implementing real change. 

     One company that has done a great job initiating change in the community as it relates to diversity, equity, and inclusion, is Google. Google continues to build campaigns that are focused on diversity and helping educate their employees as well as the people they can reach. Lorraine Twohill  discusses how Google did research to explore the diversity they have in their ads as well as how well they are doing in making sure their ads have a lot of diversity. They realized that all of their images had a lot of racial diversity but understood that they didn’t have a lot of socioeconomic diversity. They also found out how they need to have more gender representation as well. Google to combat this lack of representation reshaped a lot of their images and campaigns to have more representation. Additionally google has implemented training sessions in order to tackle diversity in campaigns and notes how 90% of employees have taken this course. Another thing Google has done that I think is really cool is represent mental health as well. They recently released an ad titled “The Picture Perfect Life” which features many individuals and their lives and shows their lives in pictures and videos but then at the end of the ad, it’s revealed that these individuals struggle with depression and suicidal thoughts. I thought this was an extremely influential ad because in just two minutes Google was able to reach people explaining how while one's life may seem perfect in pictures and videos, they can be struggling so much behind closed doors. What makes this ad a google ad is that google is advertising their Pixel 2 phone but what Google does such a great job doing is connecting their customer base by issuing ads that don’t just focus on the product but instead focus on gaining trust with their customers. 

     Lorraine Twohill is a black gay man but is also the Chief Marketing Officer at Google and he discusses how he never saw people like him in ads when growing up so he has made it his goal to do something different. In 2017, he made it his goal to elicit change in Google Marketing and hired a group of 90 individuals with diverse backgrounds to contribute to more that 300 google campaigns in order to note their thoughts and feelings about them. The marketing sector realized how helpful this was for receiving thorough feedback and decided to spread this way of work to other parts of the company. Google has made it's goal to eliminate the stereotypes in marketing as well as making sure to hold eachother accountable and stretch outside of the boxes that have been placed when it comes to representation and diversity. 

     Google has done an amazing job implementing DEI initiatives within their business but also within their ads. Doing this allows google to grow a larger, more diverse customer base because customers trust google and feel supported by google while other companies give the idea that they are just focused on the money but not the well-being of their clients. It’s important that other companies learn and apply tactics like these when trying to grow their businesses because of the fact that it can seem difficult to successfully tackle the issue of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.