In August, Ruchira Jaitly became the chief marketing officer of alcobev major Diageo India, which owns brands like Johnnie Walker, Tanqueray, Godawan, McDowell’s and more. Storyboard18 caught up with Jaitly to talk about the need for progressive portrayals of people in advertising, fostering a culture that makes diversity and inclusion must-haves and not a nice-to-have. The Indian advertising industry has witnessed changes over time. There was a time when women were only portrayed as being responsible for household chores, the colour of menses was represented as blue droplets instead of red and LGBTQIA+ representation was riddled with mockery. Cut to today. We see progress in the form of P&G’s long-running equality-at-home campaign – ‘Share the load’, HUL-owned Brooke Bond’s ‘Sab Rab De Bande’ and Starbucks’ #ItStartsWithYourName which beautifully conveyed the right of every individual to be identified as they wish.
The advertising scenario in India has matured. A study published last year stated that Indian advertisements that highlighted progressive gender roles had a positive impact, measured at 32 percent, in short-term product sales and improved the equity of a brand by 51 percent.
On the sidelines of the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) Diversity & Inclusion Summit, Jaitly touched upon the impact of progressive portrayals in advertising and marketing communications, Diageo India’s strategic collaboration within the media and marketing industry, top advertising and marketing trends for 2024 and much more.
Edited excerpts:
From your experience leading large brands, what sort of an impact do progressive portrayals in advertising and marketing communications have on consumers and brands?
Progressive portrayal has three big implications for a brand. One is, it drives superior distinctiveness and engagement for the brand with its consumers. Progressive portrayal makes me believe that the brand is a purposeful brand, one that I want to engage with. So, I’ve seen a lot of people engage meaningfully.
The second, like we’ve seen, drives long-term brand equity, which is the holy grail. The third is, it has an impact on revenues because of short-term sales.
It’s not about putting a woman who looks like she’s a corporate person in an ad. It’s about giving her the agency or the portrayal or the representation and seeing things from her lens equally.
When we do creatives around people with disabilities, people of different genders, not just binary genders, it’s all done with the sense that it’s not about me as a young person seeing an old person and saying, ‘What are they doing?’ It’s about the values the brand speaks of.
Give us two or three examples of innovative marketing campaigns that have moved the needle for the brand and business in the past two years. What impact do you see?
So, I’d love to talk about three brands. The first one is Black & White (whisky produced by Diageo), where we did ‘Cards For Sharing’ (a card game). ‘Cards For Sharing’ were these cards that you could put around the table and you could talk and open and spark conversations. These cards were done in about 22 languages. They were done for those who were visually impaired as well, so they could also have these conversations.
For me, ‘Cards For Sharing’ was that point where we actually turned around with Black & White as a brand to say, “My God, we can really, really bring to life stories of all the diverse perspectives that there are.” So it wasn’t just about LGBTQIA+, it wasn’t just about women, it was fully about men, squarely heterosexual men. It was about older people, about sharing their experiences. So, I think that was one example.
The second example is Walkers & Co where earlier this year, we launched with John Legend and Raja Kumari (Keep Walking anthem).
Raja Kumari herself represents a woman who’s a rapper, who’s gone global and who sings in vernacular. So, she’s breaking boundaries, which is why diversity is not just about these commonly known boxes. So, we’re working on a brand that has a lot of diversity and we’re looking at our brand awareness figures to the highest level.
The third example is McDowell’s, where we showcased the relationship between friends of which one of them is a person with a disability. That was five years ago.
Today, the latest creative continues to drive affinity in the space of friendship, where we actually talk about the value that diverse friendships can bring into one’s life.
Royal Challenge Packaged Drinking Water’s ‘Naya Shers’ campaign, where we didn’t just have Virat Kohli—we had a girl with vitiligo, we had a plus-sized model, we had a woman singer and a rapper who came from Canada and actually found her own way… That campaign also celebrated very unlikely heroes who challenged the odds and chose parts that were very difficult given what they do. But, they still managed to make a name for themselves.
Tell us about Diageo India’s strategic collaboration within the media and marketing industry and efforts aimed at fostering diversity and inclusivity. Why are these collaborations important?
So, we do a lot of work with the ASCI Academy, where we’ve actually put up the council and that apex council is all about how we get more progressive marketing into the conversation with marketers and advertisers.
This goes beyond just conferences. It goes into colleges, universities, goes into training people in agencies and other companies, who don’t have access to material like this.
We also work with the (UN convened) ‘Unstereotype alliance’ globally to get the right kind of progressive portrayal going. So, our framework was something that we built consulting them.
Forty five percent of all the creatives that we put out have been made with a diverse set of experiences and lenses. Women directors, women producers, women set designers and script writers etc. We also spent a good and a quantified portion of our media on progressive media, which helps to support people who are coming in with alternative or more diverse narratives.
So, whether it’s a podcast, whether it’s an influencer who’s creating content, they come from a diverse point of view or they come from a minority that’s underrepresented, and we actually spend media monies on their platforms to promote them.
That may not just be on our brand message. It will also be on supporting their platforms, like we’re doing with Aravani, where we actually take their art and put it up in some of the largest spaces across the country to normalise conversations about how people from the LGBTQIA+ community can actually use art as a way to do storytelling.
We believe Walkers & Co is a space first with Raja Kumari and Rani Kohenur (Sushant Divgikar). Now, Aravani is a space where we can enable and empower bold boundary pushers—people who are pushing boundaries in the world today to make us question what’s inclusive or not and give them platforms where they can have voice and can have expression.
What are the top marketing and advertising trends to watch for in 2024?
Consumers are going through many things at the same time. They’re going through revenge spending and we’re seeing that in the premiumisation of our portfolio; they want to drink better and better brands. But at the same time, they’re also facing inflationary headwinds, which we’re seeing across the country.
India is going to continue to be a good growth story, and within that, our consumers are looking for new experiences, and post-Covid-19 are looking at new occasions where they can socialise, have affinity with people and build bonds yet again.
This momentum is going to continue for us. What to watch for will be how we present brands with purpose, with integrity and authenticity. Because that’s the one piece that consumers are certainly looking for. They are going to call out brands if they don’t speak narratives that are authentic to the stories they’re seeing. We are seeing a lot of fantastic content on OTT, which, I think, is also driving some phenomenal new conversations