‘No one fix’: Giant Spoon’s new diverse audience marketing vp Kenny Mac on working with brands to improve diversity and inclusion

By Kristina Monllos

This past summer, Black employees in advertising called on agencies and brands to release employee diversity numbers as well as commit to structural changes that would start to combat racism in advertising. Since then, agencies have hired a number of chief diversity officers but, as previously reported by Digiday, some non-white execs say more action is needed.

Taking action to improve diversity and inclusion at companies is not only necessary to better internal company culture for employees, but to make ads that will truly connect with diverse audiences. At least, that’s part of the thinking behind Giant Spoon’s new eight-person Diverse Audience Marketing division which aims to help brands find ways to improve internal culture as well as make more authentic connections with diverse audiences through their advertising.

This week, Digiday caught up with Kenny Mac, diverse audience marketing lead, vp and strategy director at Giant Spoon to hear about the new division as well as ways brands and agencies should be continuing to push forward to improve diversity and inclusion in their companies. Mac just joined the company in August. Previously, he was the founder and lead strategist of Creative Contraband as well as the founder and creative director of Behind the Hustle.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

This past summer, diversity and inclusion became a bigger focus point at agencies. Did that inspire this new division?

[Giant Spoon Co-founders] Marc [Simons], Jon [Haber] and I have been talking about working together forever. [This past spring], we went after a client together and in the midst of us going after the [first] client — we were 95% closed — unfortunate occurrences of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor hit the news. We started to talk about what our working relationship was going to be and that led to me coming in as vp and really helping to shepherd more business.

It also was a direct ask for Marc, like, ‘We need Black leadership and I know that you have these leadership qualities and we need that here.’ Of course, that’s my responsibility as a Black man in this industry — to nurture, mentor and support the next generations coming up. But by no means, was it like, ‘Oh, the world’s like burning, we gotta go create this [division].’ There was already need for it. And all this summer did was amplify that need.

So with this new division you’re talking to brands about issues they’re having with diversity and inclusion. What are those conversations like?

There’s no one fix. It’s really us sitting with them and understanding where they are as a company and what they’re trying to do as a company as well as what they’re already doing. And then we’re looking at the audiences they’re trying to connect with and saying, ‘Well, this is where this audience is. How do we organically connect with them?’ A lot of this is touching passion points and looking [beyond] the typical analytical data. It’s looking at both of them.