What you need to know: 

• Innocean Australia is shifting the gender equality conversation to the plight of the modern man, as the lack of productive discourse around masculinity leaves future generations of men “grappling with a lack of purpose [and] belonging", per CEO Jasmin Bedir–- making for a "problem on a multitude of levels”.

• The agency's Invisible Man research with The 100% Project found the stereotyped and "emotionally rigid" masculine archetypes represented in the media pressure men to align with outdated and misogynistic ideals that were not reflective of reality – and are ultimately holding back gender equality.

• At a panel event hosted by Innocean in May, Bedir said it was up to the media and marketing industries to break from the status quo.

• Chief strategy officer Giorgia Butler reckons that starts with putting a more "empowering" lens on marketing to young boys to show them that "multiplicity and the idea of containing multitudes is theirs too for the taking".

• Joining the panel, Nova chief growth officer Adam Johnson said brands now have more choice than ever as to where to spend there media – and which publishers and messages they endorse matter. He backs "human curated" local media over algorithmically-driven global platforms. 

• Speaking from his own experience, equality advocate and single father Michael Ray points to the importance of diversifying on-screen representations of masculinity – and of fathers in particular. 

• Per Ray, advertising to fathers is currently "a white space" for brands that opt to take the lead – and he argues it's not a risk, but rather an opportunity to expand your market to include the growing number of single father households in Australia. "I don't think mothers are going to move away from a brand that has a genuine representation of a dad doing stuff.”

Under CEO Jasmin Bedir, Innocean Australia has vigorously championed gender equality.

In 2021 it launched Fck the Cupcakes to coincide with International Women’s Day, citing a mission to “fight endemic misogyny in the workplace” through “smart communications”. It’s kept the conversation going in the year since, delivering a major campaign for anti-domestic violence charity White Ribbon, and hosting pie-making workshops to engage men in the movement, while Bedir herself has remained an outspoken advocate for change.

But after years of preaching to what has, frustratingly, been a largely-female choir, Innocean is on the march to empower the “invisible” men who have been left behind by the movement – tackling masculinity, mental health, and bad role models head on.

Armed with their own whitepaper unpacking how masculine archetypes are represented by the media – and how they’re causing harm – the agency is calling on the industry to break from the status quo.

“We've written articles, keynotes, and conducted research within the industry and beyond, and it was always incredibly easy to get women in the room, but it was really hard to engage men to have conversations about anything gender,” said Bedir, speaking at a recent panel discussion hosted by the agency.

For Innocean, it surfaced a conversation around “the invisibility of men”, with the lack of productive discourse around masculinity leaving future generations of men “grappling with a lack of purpose [and] belonging”, per Bedir, and “that is a problem on a multitude of levels”.

“This is really not about the smallest violin in the world for men, but we can have empathy for what men are going through, and we can also demand engagement and action, because right now, it feels a little bit like things are getting worse for everyone, and we feel like maybe we should try and do something different,” said Bedir.

Men lost among ‘rigid’ media archetypes

Two years back, Innocean partnered with workplace gender equality advocacy group The 100% Project “to examine the impact of media on masculinity”, and in February, they published their findings in a whitepaper – ‘The Invisible Man: Redefining Masculinity in Media’.

An initial literature review unveiled three core masculine archetypes pushed in the media – the hero, the provider, and the hedonist.

A subsequent survey of 390 male participants – averaging an age of 47 years – investigated how men were impacted by the media’s portrayal of those archetypes.

There were five key findings. The first, was that men’s resonance with the archetypes correlated to their media consumption – i.e. the more media they consumed, the more like men would feel attracted to those archetypes.

“Media is actively shaping how men view themselves and their understanding of masculinity,” explained senior strategist at Innocean, Jakob Mesidis.

Secondly, those who resonated with the stereotypes promoted by the media were more likely to resonate with sexist attitudes. And third, men longed to be perceived as a positive force in the community.

“They want to be honourable” per Mesidis, but “they weren't being given the frameworks or the role models to help model themselves after”. Therein lies the fourth finding: men were frustrated with the “tight” and “emotionally rigid” boxes of “what a man should be”.

“The fifth thing we found out, and I think the most critical and the best kind of frame for this discussion, was that there wasn't really a one size fits all for masculinity,” said Mesidis. “[Men] wanted to see a more holistic representation. They want to see some of the mundane stuff that men do. They want to see more flexible and real portrayals.”

According to Giorgia Butler, it leaves men in the same place that women once were when the “Madonna-whore dichotomy” ran supreme (and many would argue it still lingers). But unlike their female counterparts, she said, men haven’t been encouraged to break out of those confines – and now, the fruits of feminism have men feeling like “women and girls are running rings around them”.

Though gender inequality remains pervasive below the surface, women’s recent dominance in the music charts, the box office, on social media and even in the classroom have all shaped the lived experience of young boys, and per Butler, left them “confused” about “being asked to do more to make things better for women”.

“If you're a young boy, you're expected to champion the systems that you inherited and didn't design. You've got to behave better than the generations before you. You've got to suppress your uncertainty about your role in society. You've got to hear again and again that masculinity itself is toxic somehow.”

“We need to start doing empowerment marketing to boys. What would that look like? That's what we've got to figure out.”

Changing the narrative

Innocean’s latest revisit of the findings came in light of the global impact of Netflix’ Adolescence, which only bolstered the agency’s will to drive the conversation forward. The four-part miniseries follows the aftermath of a 13-year-old boy’s arrest for the murder of a female classmate, exploring the dark side of social media, masculinity, and online radicalisation.

To shift the discourse to solutions, the agency’s latest event brought together Nova growth chief Adam Johnson and single father and gender equality advocate Michael Ray with Bedir and Butler to discuss what media and advertising can do to drive change.

Per Bedir: “We're the business of creating popular culture. This is a $55 billion industry, and with that, we have some responsibility to bring us forward – and the power to bring us forward.”

As for what that might look like, Butler has a few ideas of some “road rules” the industry might start with.

“The first is that I think we need to use brands and our platforms as marketers to help show boys that multiplicity and the idea of containing multitudes is theirs too, for the taking, and that's within traditional masculine codes, as well as borrowed.”

“The second is that we need to give boys permission to be fluid about their identity. They don't have to make a decision and lock it in for life.”

Third: “We need to give men a broad palette of codes that they can use to express themselves that feel a more complete spectrum from a more traditional masculine point of view.”

And fourth: “We need to empower them to stop thinking about what kind of man they are and think about what kind of human they are. Find their identity, not their masculinity, because that's really their job.”

Media choice matters

For Nova’s Johnson, the “diffusion of media” and the “multiplicity of content” in the current landscape are key to change.

“In my world, we have as many people listening to our podcast as we do our radio stations. But on our radio stations, we've got five breakfast shows. On our podcast, we've got 160 different shows, which with at least two presenters [each] you have 400 human beings.”

It’s significantly expanded the media’s capability to reflect different audiences, per Johnson, and gives advertisers more choice around what kind of content they do and don’t want to endorse with their media spend – and what they don’t.

While social media algorithms have been a key culprit in pushing archetypes and extremes, he believes that “good content” still finds its audience – and that’s where brands should be investing.

“Outside of the mass media and outside of algorithm-fuelled platforms, there is a world within other media where it's human curators, and therefore you have a morality layer around it,” he said.

“My wish would be that more brands put their money into responsible journalism and to media platforms that have a public service agreement, rather than companies that paid $40 million tax in Australia on revenues of $5 billion.”

But it’s not just global platforms that are guilty of sending the wrong message.

Per Bedir: “There is certain problematic media outlets in this country as well that just go for reach and don't care. We can openly talk about it… I've written about Ben Cousin’s redemption arc on Channel Seven, [who] is a domestic violence [perpetrator], a convicted criminal… I don’t know what that says to the women in his life, or future generations of men.”

Real dads on screen = real world change

Michael Ray, who became a father at 50 and has spent the last 13 years raising his daughter as a single parent, agreed that the media urgently needs to diversify its representations of masculinity – and of fatherhood, in particular.  

“Apart from Bluey, who I love now, I can't remember a respectful, realistic depiction of fatherhood leading up to when I became a father,” he said.

Prior to becoming a dad, Ray said he had fallen victim to the media-driven stereotypes of the bumbling Homer Simpson type of dad – a stark contrast to the “Disney-fetishised depictions of motherhood” and “maternal instinct”.

“Those depictions not only put great pressure on women that lead to that mum guilt and shame, but they also lead to the doubt and denigration of dads who do want to care.”

Instead, he said ads need to portray dads as normal parents – not “as a hero” for looking after their kids, nor as “the punchline” for doing it poorly. And he reckons it could help transform societal gender roles.

“If we tied our boys as tightly to fatherhood as what we do our girls to motherhood, and began at the beginning”, Ray reckoned there’d be less need for equality initiatives as there wouldn’t be such a gap in the first place.

Risk vs reward

The problem historically, per Johnson, is that advertising “relies on tropes” because “you’ve got a very short amount of time to catch somebody's attention”.

He says it’s why the famous ‘Like a Girl’ campaign from US feminine hygiene brand Always was so successful – “it's perfect advertising, because you're taking an existing trope and you're putting it on its head”.

But creating empowerment campaigns for young boys is less straightforward, given there hasn’t historically been a “pejorative” male stereotype to counter.

Brands have also been deterred by the perceived risk of straying from the status quo – and they’re even less willing to be bold in times of economic uncertainty.

In a previous role, Butler said she had to “fight really hard” to “get a client to put a dad in an ad for nappies”. Part of the reason it’s so hard to get over the line, she said, is because “there's no evidence to support that putting a dad in a nappy ad is going to sell more nappies”.

“So, I think it is a bit of a call for fearlessness to start talking differently about men, showing them differently … because it is a bit of uncharted territory.”

Plus, risk often comes reward and weighing in as a self-described “lay person”, Ray argues brands that take the lead are only expanding their potential market.

“Here in Australia, currently, one in five single parent households is a dad. The fastest growing family demographic in Australia is single father households, estimated to increase 44 to 65 per cent by the 2041 census. I don't see going for dads in caregiving as a risk to business – I see this as future proofing your business.”

“This is a space that no brand inhabits at the moment, and it's not so much about popularising fatherhood as it is about sharing the load with mothers. I can't believe that Huggies haven't jumped out and gone you know what? We're going to find an electorate, an area Melbourne City, where we're going to sponsor change tables into every male space there is.”

Ray suggested agencies could slowly warm their clients to the idea – start with “some A/B testing” on “some social storytelling on the socials and see where that goes.”

“This is about expanding the market, not narrowing it … I don't think mothers are going to move away from a brand that has a genuine representation of a dad doing stuff.”

Structural change needed

Importantly, on-screen representation needs to go hand-in-hand with policy – and for Ray, equal workplace entitlements for both mothers and fathers would go a long way to resolving gender imbalance “at the top”.

“We obsess over women in the C-suite, women in STEM, women in leadership, but we don't look at what's led to the inequity at the top – the foundational part. If we had men with a mandated paternity leave, a lot of that will go away.”

He argued that would enable and incentivise men to take a more active role in parenting from the get-go, easing the parental burden on women. In turn, he said it would do away with outdated employer biases that paint new fathers as hardworking “providers” and new mothers – or even potential future mothers – as a risk to productivity.

It’s food for thought for local media and advertising sectors in which gender disparities continue to pervade at the top tiers, as seen in the latest Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) figures.

"[Workplaces] want a return on investment and all the rest of it. You want to talk about employee engagement? Show me any employee that's got problems at home. Show me any employee that's got a sick kid that feels like they've been torn between the two and aren't supported," said Ray.

"This isn't just a dad thing or a mum thing – we devalue the whole primary and secondary caregiver. It irks me because it diminishes and devalues not only the relationship between the father and the child, but also between the mother and the employer. 

"No one is winning with these outdated gender expectations and stereotypes."