Adweek
published a perspective arguing for investing in diverse media with cash versus
crumbs.
There’s nothing
new in the content, which is titled, “By Fearing Wokeness, Marketers Are
Hitting the Snooze Button on Growth.”
No,
marketers don’t fear wokeness; rather, they are hitting systemic racism with
eyes wide open.
By Fearing
Wokeness, Marketers Are Hitting the Snooze Button on Growth
Investing in diverse media is not woke—it’s following the money.
By
DéVon Christopher Johnson
America is
celebrating its 250th anniversary this year. Between the speeches about 1776,
the stubborn fight for independence, and building a new nation, we must
recognize the vital role inclusion played then and still plays today.
Before we were the United
States, we were 13 colonies with different dialects, agriculture, economic, and
social norms. They decided to come together, combining their differences as an
asset to push out a tyrannical monarchy in favor of representative democracy.
Then as now, this nation’s greatness belongs to its diverse population—the very
audience media budgets are supposed to capture.
Yet the corporate pledges of
2020 have quietly vanished without the same fanfare and press releases that had
heralded their arrival. It is clear now that funding diverse-owned media was
driven by temporary sympathy rather than a structural business model. But
sympathy is a fleeting foundation; it has no contracts or renewals, and quickly
evaporates when the political climate shifts.
Those brands were never truly
doing business with us. At best, they were doing temporary penance. Which has
now expired.
Sympathy is for cards. The
moral case for inclusion remains solid. But within a corporation, it’s as
unreliable as the weather in April, shifting with the storms and vanishing with
clear skies.
Corporations rely on
comfortable profitability rather than durability, so we must shift the focus
from a moral plea to a rigorous economic argument.
Good thing the math supports
the same conclusion.
The multicultural market is
worth $5.3 trillion. Despite this immense scale, the advertising sector
allocates less than 2% of its total budgets to diverse-owned media platforms.
These outlets hold the trust of the fastest-growing consumer segments. Instead
of working toward the ANA’s 6.5% benchmark established for 2025, the industry
spent the entire year locked in debates over whether such targets should even
exist.
Under normal market conditions,
a gap this wide between market potential and actual funding would be seized
upon as a classic arbitrage opportunity. Instead, having been stamped with the
“diversity” label, this highly lucrative audience segment is cast aside as a
political liability rather than valued for what it actually is: the single most
underpriced connection in the modern media landscape.
The industry is conflating DEI
with any marketing spend that targets diverse communities. DEI is strictly an
HR and workforce imperative, designed to ensure internal staffing mirrors the
broader population. Whatever your political stance, that internal
representation matters.
On the flip side, investing in
multicultural media is pure marketing. A diverse consumer base is not a social
cause; it is a vital market. Marketers must focus strictly on the numbers:
reach, resonance, and ROI. When chief marketing officers scale back multicultural
ad buys under the guise of “DEI being under fire,” they commit a fundamental
category error. It allows external ideological skirmishes to quietly override media
plans and disregard actual spreadsheets.
We saw this play out in 2025,
where the market graded these choices in real time. Facing identical external
pressures, two major retailers chose entirely different paths. In January 2025,
Target capitulated by rolling back its DEI-focused initiatives in hiring and
its supply chain, triggering an 11-week freefall in foot traffic; its
now-former CEO later conceded on an earnings call that retreating directly
caused the revenue decline and wiped out billions in market value.
Conversely, Costco stood its
ground by handing the choice to its shareholders, who resoundingly rejected an
anti-DEI proposal with over 98% of the vote. The very week its competitor’s
traffic plummeted, this steadfast retailer experienced a surge in foot traffic.
Two identical situations, but diametrically opposed decisions and results.
Ultimately, both “woke” and
“anti-woke” are shallow, reactionary ideologies. Being truly awake is an active
discipline. It means deeply understanding who your audience is, what they
consume, who they trust, and where they will stand two decades from now. The
brands that eagerly paraded their “values” in 2020 only to drop them in 2025
were merely sleepwalking, then hit the snooze button on their own consumer
base.
For half a decade, marketers
were told to fear wokeness. Few bothered to actually wake up.
Two hundred and fifty years
ago, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense mobilized a reluctant nation toward revolution
by masterfully balancing commercial interests with moral duty. Now, as it was
then, America’s true strength is rooted in all of its people, including those
currently excluded from media plans.
I challenge marketers to summon
the very quality Paine championed: courage, which is currently in desperately
short supply. Now that ethical responsibility and business intelligence have
finally converged, the sole remaining ingredient is simply the raw nerve to
act.
