Audience measurement company Comscore and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA’s) SeeHer program have partnered together to develop GEM Audiences, a digital planning insight tool to measure the importance of gender equality for advertisers' target audiences.
Chief Research Officer of ANA and SeeHer Latha Sarathy, and Danan Ren, SVP and Head of Client Insights at Comscore, explained to StreamTV Insider how the tool itself is a jumping-off point for the larger structural and cultural challenge of embedding a more dimensional view and inclusive set of best practices into the ecosystem of media marketing.
“It starts with the overarching idea of: Is gender equality important to you? Then it goes a lot deeper,” Sarathy explained. Ren added that Comscore and SeeHer sit “on a goldmine of data at a very granular, precise level, and this is a chance for us to put some purpose behind the data.”
SeeHer is an initiative launched by ANA in 2016 to promote more accurate portrayals of women in advertising and media, developing its Gender Equality Measure (GEM) methodology for identifying gender bias within the industry.
The partnership embeds the new tool into Comscore’s Plan Metrix platform — a broader data insight and custom audience targeting tool started in 2017 with over 11,000 endpoints on audiences’ online activities and behaviors, including streaming service engagement — to help advertisers and marketers more thoroughly understand their audience segments. While the tool is a measurement of viewers valuing gender equality, the bigger picture and mission of the partnership is to reduce bias within the industry.
Measurement and messaging matters
Ultimately, the GEM Audience tool is a psychographic attitude module “of consumers who have a gender equality mindset,” Sarathy explained. SeeHer’s research shows investing in this understanding increases sales, brand growth and overall brand awareness.
From streaming habits and choices to critical decisions made at work (or at home for that matter), the module goes “beyond just gender and income and more into those interest attitudes.” Ren explained.
An advertiser may create an audience profile that predominantly watches Hulu and HBO, spends over $10,000 on online travel, has at least one child in the household, makes over six figures a year, and says, “gender equality matters to me.” The tool allows them to see what sites they visit most often, Ren continued. “It takes it from just the insights intel piece into a planning tool” that can analyze where to take ads across desktop and mobile environments and even into what digital media partners will be best to collaborate with on reaching that target audience.
But while a company may target a high-income business decision-maker, they then must understand the attitudes behind those audience members, Sarathy added. “That messaging matters.”
Following the initial attitude, the tool then investigates the audiences’ reflections on how gender representation currently looks to them and what progress they are eager to see, moving beyond demographic boundaries and into deeper issues like gender fluidity.
“The industry as a whole, we're moving away from just demographics [as a] generalization into really understanding who that consumer is,” Ren said. “Right now, it's at the measurement phase. We're bringing insights, we're showing some of the data points.” The next step: “How do we now take this and inspire brands to take action? That's the only way we're going to really move this forward.”
Even as advertisers make efforts to reach more inclusive targeted demographics, “a lot of times these topics or the areas will come in and out of ‘fashion’, or what's top of mind [for marketers],” Sarathy added. “We want this to be something that is always on for marketers. To think about gender equality both in front of the camera and behind the camera in every aspect.”
The two companies are looking to catalyze that “groundswell change so that we don't have to constantly have these conversations, and it can be embedded in everything we do as an industry,” she commented.
Article updated to correct spelling of Latha Sarathy's last name and clarify aim of the SeeHer initiative.