What you need to know:

• NAB is the first client to pilot Mindshare’s new ‘Inclusion Private Marketplace’, which will ask publishers to tag content that falls in specific communities so ads can be placed there.
• The bank has apportioned budget for an upcoming brand campaign, rolling out from July, plugging into SBS and The Guardian via the marketplace.
• NAB will measure the success based on brand impact results provided by publishers, with NAB’s Operations, Planning and Partnerships Executive, Tom Dobson, insisting “too many campaigns just drive for the bottom of the funnel”.
• Instead, NAB will rely on brand uplift reports from the publishers, but results will be reviewed weekly or fortnightly.
• Mindshare will roll out the Inclusion PMP to other clients this year. 
• The move comes after GroupM CEO Amy Buchanan flagged a push for "diversity of media" within buys to Mi3 earlier this year.

Different metrics

NAB has carved out a portion of budget from an upcoming campaign to pilot a new Inclusion Private Marketplace created by GroupM’s Mindshare, which will funnel ads to content on publishers tagged as First Nations and LGBTQI+.

The platform is a new approach to benchmark, measure and direct ad spend to underrepresented communities. Working through direct deals with – to start – SBS and The Guardian, new Inclusion PMP is a closed programmatic marketplace for Mindshare clients.

“We’ve got some skin in the game,” NAB’s Operations, Planning and Partnerships executive, Thomas Dobson, said.

“Clearly there are some bigger reach channels that we’re already committed to, but we want to do this as a long-term thing because it makes good business sense. It’s good growth and we really want to demonstrate our commitment.”

NAB is one of Australia’s biggest advertisers, spending in excess of $60 million a year on media. But this portion of spend, placed with diverse communities using Mindshare’s Inclusion PMP, will be measured differently to other media.

“You can’t expect to have the same product-led ROI (return on investment),” Dobson said. “Too many campaigns just drive for the bottom of the funnel. So we are looking for awareness and consideration across a broader audience.”

This is where purpose meets price, and where supporting First Nations peoples, new Australians and women hits the marketer hip pocket.

“Talk is cheap, action is everything,” Mindshare’s Australasia CEO, Katie Rigg Smith, said.

While each of the agency’s clients has a different approach to environmental, social and governance (ESG) and diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I), Rigg-Smith said enabling them to walk the talk is what matters.

“We’re not here to judge them on [their approaches], we’re just here to help facilitate action, even small steps, to helping them realise their ambition,” she said.

The creation of the inclusion marketplace comes as GroupM steps up its own ambitions on both ESG and DE&I fronts. The holdco last week reiterated calls for brands to move money into media channels that are actively reducing carbon emissions, while ANZ boss Aimee Buchanan has flagged a potential shift away from years of consolidating media buys in a bid for efficiency, towards more diverse media buys.

"How can you talk about diversity inclusion if you're not using the channels that those audiences consume – and they're not going to be necessarily mainstream channels? You have to walk the walk," Buchanan told Mi3 in February. "So we are looking at how we curate audiences to reach people in different cultural groups across the country. If we don't do that, we're not doing our job."

It’s been an eight-month process to build the private marketplace, which will more closely measure the diversity of content alongside which the agency’s clients’ digital ads are placed. From July, NAB’s More than Money campaign will be bought through it – pending results, it will roll out to other Mindshare clients throughout the year. 

There's more coming with diversity metrics. Nielsen's Monique Perry told the Australian Association of National Advertisers' (AANA's) RESET event last month the measurement company was looking at benchmarking diversity in media. 

"One of the things we are launching later this year is inclusion analytics, which is really looking at the diversity of the content we're seeing on our screens and scoring it - ethnicity, gender, disability," Perry said.

Being able to clearly demonstrate diverse media spend is crucial. NAB already spends with SBS and NITV, broadly supporting SBS’s ‘Beyond 3%’ initiative, which asks brands to spend at least three per cent of their media budget with First Nations media. For NAB, that would likely be a couple of million dollars – it’s not there just yet, but that share is growing bit by bit. 

Brand safety

In early 2020, Mindshare’s US team created a similar marketplace with SKYY Vodka specifically for LGBTQI+ content – 73 per cent of the community’s news is incorrectly flagged as breaching brand safety guidelines, meaning it misses out on ad dollars.

“This Inclusion PMP absolutely gets around that and it gets around it by focusing on content tags,” Chris Solomon, Mindshare Melbourne’s Managing Director, said.

“If that content has that tag applied to it, then it’s deemed safe. The exclusion lists don’t apply, and our ads can be served across it.”

SBS and The Guardian must place specific tags on content to access the ad dollars, and the agency is speaking to 13 other publishers before moving to indies and smaller content creators.  

It is not a way to ‘clip the ticket’ or drive additional revenues, Rigg Smith and Solomon insist – “hell no”, Rigg Smith said – but is done simply for the purpose of doing it. The goal is to incentivise more content aimed at those communities, but the pilot starts with two bigger publishers because it gets the ball rolling.

“As we move into the independents, the impact becomes greater because those funds will go directly to the independent content creators themselves,” Solomon said.

“[NAB] were very quick to come to the realisation that this is being done for a different purpose. And that purpose is as powerful as driving through to product sales.”