Verizon released the first-year results of its Responsible Marketing Action Plan, which was announced in April 2021 as part of the company's long-term commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The telecommunications giant's plan involves four areas: increasing diversity and equity across its creative supply chain; building an inclusive work environment and retaining diverse talent; fighting racism and eliminating bias in its advertising, content, and media; and instilling responsible content policies. The Verizon marketing team for 2021, inclusive of both the brand and agency partners, was approximately 3,900 people in the U.S.

The action plan encompasses data from Verizon’s internal marketing team and agency teams, which make up more than half of Verizon’s full marketing team, according to a statement by the company. In addition to Verizon's own marketing organization and in-house agency, it has a roster of 12 external agency partners, according to Diego Scotti, chief marketing officer of Verizon, including McCann, Momentum, MRM, Madwell, R/GA, The Community and VM1 among others. Below is an outline of its progress so far.

Get your tickets for the Small Agency Conference & Awards, held in Chicago on July 26 and 27, at AdAge.com/SACA2022 

Budgeting for diversity

Verizon last year set a goal to spend over 30% of its video, experiential and print production budget with diverse companies. 

Over a year later, the company says it has spent 65% of its video budget with diverse-owned video production companies and 49% of its video productions used diverse directors. Verizon also spent 46% of its experiential budget with diverse-owned experiential production companies and 45% of its print budget with diverse-owned print production companies.

Verizon defines diverse-owned as a business that is at least 51% owned and operated by an individual or group that is part of a traditionally underrepresented or underserved group, according to a spokeswoman for the company. This includes Black, Indigenous, and people of color, women, LGBTQ+, veterans and proprietors with disabilities.

Examples of diverse-owned companies Verizon has worked with include Prettybird, Epoch Films, Park Pictures, Makers Lab for production, Cosmo Street and Sarofsky for post-production and editorial, and Duggal Visual Solutions for print.

For 2022, Verizon is increasing its overall goals across video, experiential, and print from 30% to 40%, although Scotti said that this new benchmark could change at some point. 

“I personally think that we have to raise the bar,” Scotti said. “We're trying to be sensitive with COVID and this being the first year...but I think we're going to raise the objective because we definitely see the opportunity and it will keep people focused.”

Accountability and talent

People of color composed 39.3% of the combined Verizon marketing and agency team, an increase from 37.1% at year-end 2020. Women made up 51.7%, which is an increase from 50.9% in 2020. (There was no specific goal established for the makeup of the team in the first year.)

While Verizon’s year-over-year change in diverse talent was a little more modest compared to other areas in the action plan, Scotti still sees this as a significant improvement.

“The reality is that when you start with a team that is composed of the people that you have you can't just fire half of them, and then rehire,” Scotti said. “It is going to take a while. I'm super impressed with those numbers because growing from 37% to 39% on people of color is massive in the sense of when you look at the overall composition of the team now and when you look at new hires in the last year.”

In 2021, Black, Indigenous, and people of color talent made up 46.5% of Verizon’s new hires, and women made up 56.3%.

One challenge that Scotti and Verizon focused on tackling early on was making sure executives across its marketing and agency teams were held accountable. 

“One of the challenges that we saw at the beginning was accountability,” Scotti said. "Everything that we've done either to put in some goals where it makes sense or reporting publicly or having these meetings quarterly with the agencies where they're not only reporting to me, they're reporting to each other, so there is also accountability to each other. That is a critical challenge to overcome, which is how do you get people accountable? What I say to the team all the time is that if I leave this job, this should be something that should continue without me not that it's just happening because I'm calling people every week to see how things are going. [The goal is to] make it systemic, scalable, and also to really make sure that it runs deep in the purpose of the team.”

As a result, Verizon set up a DE&I Agency Council, in which CEOs and creative leads of each of its agency partners meet quarterly and report their diversity numbers “in front of everybody else,” Scotti said.

Every meeting has two parts. The first one is reporting results and discussion about the results. "Everybody talks about what they are doing to either improve in the areas and where they need to improve. Our goal is to get as close as possible to the composition of the job market in America. The second part of the meeting is then when you look at this as a whole, as Verizon and these agencies together, what are the areas that we need to put more focus on?"  said Scotti.

The idea for Verizon’s Adfellows program, which is a fellowship program focused on getting diverse talent into the industry, came from a council meeting, Scotti said. Currently, the AdFellows program is in its fifth year.

Training against bias

Verizon has also made sure that 100% of its advertising goes through gender and cultural bias testing. 

To accomplish this Verizon uses a measurement tool from SeeHer, an organization comprised of marketers, agencies, and media companies dedicated to making sure women are portrayed accurately in various forms of marketing, advertising, media, and entertainment.  

SeeHer’s Gender Equity Measure (GEM) is a research methodology that quantifies gender bias. Verizon said it received what it called an “above-average” GEM score of 99.  According to the organization’s website, ads are submitted to SeeHer for testing and members receive detailed results, typically within 10-20 business days.

Verizon also uses its own proprietary “Diversity Inclusion & Equality Measure” to vet the representation of race, gender, ethnicity, and identity in its advertising. “We created our own version of the SeeHer GEM indicator but for diversity beyond gender,” Scotti said. “It's an important thing because when the creatives of the agencies start seeing that you are actually measuring the creative with those lenses it creates a virtual cycle. It's not punitive what we do, but it's like, ‘Guys, we have to do better.’”

All Verizon marketers and agency partners also completed anti-racism and bias training to help identify bias throughout the creative process from research to production, according to Scotti, which will continue as required training for new hires. 

Scotti said Verizon is also “ruthless” about where its media is placed. The company achieved a 99.4% rating (out of 100%) within the Integral Ad Science Brand Safety measure that counts the percentage of media placements that “do not violate the brand safety threshold,” according to a statement by Verizon.

While it is hard to exactly measure the impact of its results and how Verizon is viewed in the marketplace, Scotti says Verizon’s penetration in diverse segments such as the Hispanic community “has never been stronger.”

“The No. 1 thing that has made a difference for us is to almost flip the model in terms of making these groups part of our mainstream communications and advertising,” Scotti said. "In fact, we're doing less specific advertising and more of just representing these groups in the right way by bringing them into the mainstream, which is also what these groups want. They want to see themselves represented in the whole. With older generations [for example], maybe they said, ’No I want you to speak to me in Spanish only,’ There are new generations that are very respectful and proud of their heritage, but they also speak English." 

“I remember a few years ago we had spots that we did for the Oscars that were in Spanglish [a mix of English and Spanish]. The Academy wanted us to use subtitles for the commercials and we refused to do that because we said, 'Well, that that's not accepting how people speak and being respectful of individuality,” Scotti added.

Creating a blueprint

Verizon also provided a Responsible Marketing Action Blueprint, which is a set of free online tools that combine different learnings from Verizon’s work around DE&I that other marketers could use. The blueprint includes a template letter that marketers can use to request agency partners to report certain aspects of their DE&I-related numbers, a guide to formalizing a DE&I council, and more.

Get your tickets for the Small Agency Conference & Awards, held in Chicago on July 26 and 27, at AdAge.com/SACA2022

“I always tell people to start somewhere—instead of all the four areas at once you start in one area,” Scotti said. “Maybe look at where's the low-hanging fruit so that you can start making progress. That's how we did it, and when you make progress, more progress comes and you create that cycle.”