MediaMonks Buenos Aires Powers Up with Diversity

For brands willing to truly differentiate and transform, diversity is key. Much like how digital transformation entails a focus on increasing technical literacy within your organization, powering up a brand’s creative potential requires the brand or business to focus on diversifying teams and embracing inclusivity-led growth. (You can read this post’s Spanish version right here)

Think about it: your talent pool designs your products, experiences and services. With more diverse talent, you’re better equipped to offer a greater variety of experiences; with a plurality of genders, races, cultures and backgrounds, a workplace becomes a breeding ground for innovative and fresh ideas. This is why a focus on diversity was critical to the rapid growth of our office in Buenos Aires, which serves as a strategic creative hub for the Americas and has recently hired its 200th Monk after four years in operation.

Able to develop and iterate on fresh ideas, brands have extracted real bottom-line value from diversity-based growth, too: those with greater gender and race diversity are 25% more likely to have better financial returns than less diverse organizations, and Google found that women-led and gender-balanced videos enjoyed 30% more views than others. These findings suggest there is a strong demand for inclusive content, but organizations that aren’t diverse and inclusive themselves will struggle to create it. So, while many organizations have a desire for growth, they shouldn’t merely view it as an expansion of the business—it’s a critical opportunity to integrate new, diverse voices into your creative process for the better.

Similarly, this vision has driven a people-focused strategy for inclusivity at Firewood Marketing, which merged with MediaMonks last year. Kamron Hack, Director of People at Firewood, wrote about her strategy: “Instead of creating employee resource groups just for the sake of having them, or implementing diversity training without knowing what type of training was needed, we invited our employees to tell us who they are by submitting poems, statements, stories, and pictures that we displayed in an open space to share with one another.”

Building Better Teams

We understand that our clients have a real desire for diversity of all types—for example, multicultural messaging. Sharing the stage with MediaMonks at a Brand Innovators summit, Nestle’s CMO Alicia Enciso mentioned how such initiatives must be top-of-mind for today’s organizations. “When you’re trying to market multicultural, you also must have a multicultural team,” she said. “Diversity needs to be a priority internally, externally and everywhere in between.”

With diversity front and center, we’ve accelerated our increase in personnel from a variety of backgrounds. At the same time, these efforts have had the added effect of improving our offerings of premium digital content–platforms, digital design, video games, VR, and much more–for clients from all types of industries around the world. In our Buenos Aires office in particular, which serves as a creative hub for the Americas, we’ve found that the quality of work has increased in lockstep with our capacity.

“We want to keep incorporating talents from different disciplines and cultures,” says Erika Irei, HR Business Partner at MediaMonks Buenos Aires. “We are focused on building a team with greater diversity, particularly on technology leadership or creativity, which is a big challenge for the industry.” In this respect, diverse teams are just better: they bring together a plurality of perspectives and experiences and are uniquely equipped to tackle a large variety of creative challenges for different markets.

From future-proofing your business to achieving a higher quality of work, diversity can truly impact your organization on many levels. And it’s not just about achieving growth or what diversity can do for the bottom line; cultivating a more inclusive workspace is simply better for teams that like to feel heard, exchange ideas and challenge themselves. For both consumers and employees, diversity is key to enhancing the overall brand experience.