What you need to know:

• Former tennis champion and Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott has partner with ad agecy Special to launch Shift 20 Initiative – a coalition of leading brands that want to improve the representation of people with disability in advertising and the media.
• ANZ, AAMI, Bonds, Kia, McDonalds, Oral-B, nib, Pantene, Uber, and Weet-Bix have swapped out scenes in their ads and included people with various disabilities. Tourism Australia, Virgin Australia and TikTok are also foundation partners.
• The opportunity is huge: it is estimated people with disabilities, more than a billion people globally, influence $13 trillion in annual disposable income globally – but less than 1 per cent of ads represent them.
• Procter & Gamble Company Accessibility Leader Sumaira Latif says aside from commercial benefits, people with disabilities are great problem solvers and communicators, and enhance creative.
• Bonds Marketing Manager Kedda Ghazarian says the underwear brand wants to "reflect the fabric of Australia" and has encouraged other markets to be brave and represent the 20 per cent of consumers with a disability.
• On-screen talent now featuring in their ads aim to shift perceptions and open up doors for people with disability to be cast in more ads in the future.

Marketers are being encouraged to become disability confident and represent the 20 per cent of their audiences that are almost always ignored in advertising.

While brands and the media supply chain in recent years have focused heavily on improving diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) within both their output and teams, disability has long been a blindspot. 

A coalition of Australian firms is bidding to change that.

On Sunday, former tennis champion and Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott launched the Shift 20 campaign in partnership with the advertising agency Special and media agency PHD. Other production companies and consultants involved include Bus Stop Film, Revolver, Glue Society and Rumble Studios.

The aim is simple: Alcott wants advertisers to cast people with disabilities in their ads to better reflect society, as circa one in five Australians have some form of disability.

More than a dozen brands, including Pantene, Oral-B and Bonds, supported the resulting ‘Unignorable Adbreak’, swapping out key scenes in their advertising to include a person with disability. The takeover ad break aired on The Project, where Alcott unpacked the initiative, and will continue to run throughout the course of their respective campaigns. 

The Pantene ad features pole dancing champion Deb Roach while Oral B’s Brush like a Pro stars Paralympic gold medallist and swimmer Tiffany Thomas Kane. The Bonds spot stars deaf actor Nathan Borg. 

Mi3 caught up with senior marketers at P&G and Bonds, as well Thomas Kane and Borg, to discuss why the industry needs to drop the fear factor and start representing its audience’s diversity.

'My life's mission'

Alcott, who has won 23 tennis grand slam titles, told Mi3 that changing perceptions around disability has become his life’s mission after a childhood in which he never felt he was being represented in the media.

“When I was a kid, I never saw anybody liked me on TV. Whenever I did it was a road safety ad with someone having a car accident and then someone like me in tears because their life was over. I used to sit at home playing video games and I was embarrassed to leave the house because I wasn't proud of the person I was and proud of my disability.”

Alcott has gained a high profile through his tennis exploits and, more recently, as Australian of the Year, but points out that disability is the one area of diversity overlooked by adland and the media.

The aim of the Shift 20 Initiative is to encourage as many brands as possible to represent disability so that it becomes normalised in advertising. Success, he said, means “I don’t have to go on The Project to talk about disability and inclusion [any more], because it's everywhere.

“The fact that the Weetbix kid, Eva, is in a wheelchair right now and that Nathan in the Bonds commercial is communicating in sign language would have changed my life if I saw that as a kid.”

Alcott explains more about the initiative in the video below.

The business case

Procter & Gamble (P&G), the parent company of Pantene (see video below) and Oral-B, has been working on an internal programme to improve how comfortable its employees feel working with disabled people. 

P&G’s Company Accessibility Leader Sumaira Latif, who is blind, told Mi3 there are several ethical and commercial reasons why better representing the disabled community makes sense.

“For businesses thinking about this, my message is that people with disabilities influence around $13 trillion in annual disposable income around the world,” she said, citing a 2020 Global Economics of Disability report. “We have got money to spend, so show me what you’ve got, something that will compel me in your advertising, and part of that is reflecting someone like me.”

Aside from the commercial imperative, Latif said working with talent that represents the 20 per cent of society that has a disability is key, whereas Kantar estimates that only 1 per cent of people currently starring in ads have a disability.

She said P&G must “reflect the humanity that we serve” – and not just in terms of how brands go to market, but also through the business – from recruitment to product design, and added that it can only pay dividends.

“As we're increasing the number of people with disability inside our company, we're recognising that people with disabilities bring a real strength and are an incredible untapped pool of talent,” Latif said.

“Because I’m blind there are a lot of barriers in my life everyday. I've learned to think outside the box and become a really good problem solver and communicator – because I have to be.”

P&G has an internal campaign to improve its employees’ disability confidence across its 100,000 staff globally – from c-suite to rank and file.

To help business leaders better understand how advertising is perceived by consumers with different disabilities, Latif starts by showing them an ad that blurs out the visuals, to illustrate what it is like for blind people. Likewise the same ad with visuals, but on mute, to better understand how deaf people live.

A similar process has gone into product design, with executives asked to use P&G products wearing a blindfold or with gloves that simulate arthritis. These considerations are being baked-in to product development; for example in 2018 Herbal Essences shampoo bottles were designed with tactile stripes while conditioners featured tactile dots to help blind consumers identify the different products.

“By including people with disability in our design process, whether it is media or products, we're not just making the world a better place, we're going to grow the number of users that can use our products and those that remain loyal to the brand,” Latif said.

The power of feeling seen

Underwear maker Bonds has been working internally with the Australian Network on Disability, which produces index reports to help organisations become more disability confident. 

For its Unignorable Adbreak, Nathan Borg stars in its Bonds Total Package spot that also features superyacht captain Jason Chambers from reality TV show Below Deck.

Bonds Marketing Manager Kedda Ghazarian told Mi3 that Bonds recognises it must “reflect the fabric of Australia” and cast ads accordingly.

“Disability is a huge part of that and will continue to be,” she said. “We feature a lot of people in our campaigns and our e-commerce imagery and with that comes a responsibility to make sure that they're representative of Australia."

Ghazarian said that ambition is not commercially motivated. But she thinks better diversity can only be a win-win.

“While it's not about revenue raising, it is still an important consideration. We want to make sure our customers feel seen. Over time we would hope that means there's lots of Bonds fans and loyalists that will continue shopping with us for years to come.”

The brand has run ads with diverse casts before, advocating body confidence  – its Future is Your Undies campaign is a good example – but this is the first time Bonds has worked with a deaf actor.

During casting and the shoot, Bonds and its agency Special had to provide some adjustments, such as working with Auslan translators, otherwise Ghazarian was struck by how little difference there was versus a regular shoot.

“The big learning that I got, outside of some good Auslan tips, is that there are lots of people who are really excited to be part of these campaigns and as brands we need to do better at providing these opportunities,” she said. “At the end of the day, people with disability can do it all – there's no reason why that should be viewed any differently.”

Overcoming fear

If the business case is compelling and working with the talent is a positive experience, why don’t more marketers consider people with disability in their creative?

Latif believes there are two major reasons: ignorance and the fear of getting it wrong.

“There is a lack of disability confidence from people,” she said. “Their initial reaction is that they're uncomfortable around disability because many people haven't grown up with disabled people. They may feel sympathetic towards disabled people, or they just assume, wrongly, that disabled people are unable to do certain jobs.”

Bonds’ Kedda believes the fear factor is real and holds marketers back from considering people with disability on the same page as other areas of diversity, such as gender, ethnicity and sexuality.

“That ‘wait until we're perfect’ mindset has meant that a lot of people have felt really unseen and underrepresented,” she said. “But there's only positives that can come from this type of work and it's important to focus on those really meaningful outcomes, rather than just the fear.”

For Alcott, it's OK for brands to get it wrong, "but you've got to give it a crack first".

"To not get it wrong" he said, brands must "listen to the lived experience of people with disability – communicate and co-design with us ... It's way easier than you think. People overcomplicate inclusion, because of a lack of understanding or not being sure where to start," he said.

"My goal with the marketers is I want to be redundant. I want everybody to put more people with disabilities in their their marketing communications – because that's what we deserve and it's also great for them to do it as well."

Oral-B: Brush like a pro

Tiffany Thomas Kane is not like most people with disability. The Paralympic swimmer is used to being in the spotlight, winning a gold medal and three bronze at the Rio Paralympics and several other medals at Tokyo.

Alcott got in touch with Thomas Kane to star in an Oral-B ad for Shift 20 and she has since become an Oral-B ambassador.

“You'll never see an ad or a TV show with someone with short stature or someone who is blind or deaf or any sort of disability,” she said. “People with disabilitiy just haven’t been showcased in the media enough…I think this will help prove to people with disability that nothing can stop them.”

During the shoot, Thomas Kane said she was made to feel like “the number one girl”, which took her back to her swimming successes, and would welcome more commercial opportunities.

From a consumer perspective, she said brands that showcase people with disability give her a “warm feeling” and make her feel more accepted, but the ultimate goal is that these ads become the norm, rather than the exception.

“If brands really want to get noticed and create that warmth towards their ads, they showed they should put us in them,” she said.

Bonds: Total Package

Actor Nathan Borg is constantly looking for roles, but often with little success because most productions won’t cast deaf characters who speak or sign. 

He noticed an ad for the Bonds commercial on Instagram and found himself up against deaf friends auditioning for the role.

“I’ve always wanted to do clothing advertisements, so Bonds was the real dream for me,” he told Mi3. “I have worked on many professional projects and shooting this ad was the most inclusive set I have ever been on. They asked what my deaf identity is, how I want to communicate, and also arranged my preferred deaf consultants, a Deaf camera operator in the crew and three of the most respected Auslan interpreters for the day. I arrived on set like any other privileged actor does and damn, finally.” 

For Borg it’s been a lifelong challenge to find acceptance growing up in a country where deaf people were never shown in the media.

“When I was growing up more and more, with how rare diversity was in Australia, I felt that I wasn’t okay in society. I had to relate to other minorities on the American screen to feel connected. It is so important that people with disabilities are heard on bigger platforms, we are seriously overdue in Australia.”

Borg said that he “soaked it all in” because he is unsure if an opportunity to star in a TV ad will arrive again. He hopes the Bonds ad will not only have a positive impact on how the deaf community is perceived, but will inspire other brands to cast hard of hearing talent.