AMVBBDO

Client: The Valuable 500
Product: The Valuable 500
Title: Diversish
Media: Online
Country: United Kingdom
Date Of Campaign: January 2019

Background: The Valuable 500 is a business to business disability inclusion initiative. Its goal is to convince private sector influential companies to make disability their business priority: something very few of them want to do. The company tasked the agency with creating an advertising campaign to convince business leaders at The World Economic Forum in Davos to put disability on their board agendas.

Idea: We created a word to describe companies that claim to care about diversity but ignore disability. DIVERSish. To illustrate the most common types of diversish behaviour, we created a campaign that exposed the toe-curling reality of selective inclusivity in business. In a series of fictional interviews, high-flying business leaders are receiving an award that recognises the true value of their commitment to diversity and inclusion. Presenter Chris interviews the winners and asks them to describe the ways their organizations have considered the needs of people with disabilities. Responses range from dismissive to unintentionally offensive. When pressed on the issue they have no answer or fumble for an inadequate corporate response. The message reads: “90% of companies claim to prioritise diversity, only 4% prioritise disability.” Followed by the line: “Stop being #diversish, join thevaluable500.com”This campaign was aimed at high-profile executives of influential private sector companies. The goal was to convince them to make disability their business priority. Our message was straightforward: if disability is not on your agenda, neither is diversity. The campaign was commissioned specifically to be launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The WEF officials loved it. But didn’t allow to show or mention it. In under 24 hours we dveloped a plan B. We hyper-targeted the delegates with the film on social media, then retargeted them with messages from disability activists. And even when the delegates left Davos, we continued targeting them with additional reasons to sign up.

Results: In the last ten years of tireless campaigning the #Valuable has only managed to recruit one multinational to their cause. Within ten days of the ‘DIVERSish' launch, 51 private sector multinational companies have signed up to The Valuable500 and the list keeps growing. The likes of Microsoft, Virgin Media, Barclays, Boeing, Sainsburys, Fujitsu, Accenture, among them. Importantly ‘Diversish’ isn’t just an endline for our film. It is a greater idea for activists everywhere, an expression to confront the injustice of disability exclusion. Until now, the world’s most powerful business leaders have never been confronted in a way that left them no option but to rethink their diversity agendas. ‘DIVERSish’ has given a name to their decades-long procrastination. They can’t cancel their current Diversity & Inclusion initiatives. But they can’t continue ignoring disabled people either, not without being called out and labeled diversish.