Tena and AMV BBDO win Channel 4’s Diversity in Advertising Award
Channel 4 and 4Sales have revealed Tena and creative agency AMV BBDO as the winning campaign of its prestigious Diversity in Advertising Award 2021.
Tena and AMV BDDO’s winning campaign utilizes a storyline to educate viewers about the realities of menopause
The annual award offers brands and agencies the opportunity to win over £1m of free advertising for the best creative response to Channel 4’s diversity brief.
This sixth edition of the competition invited advertisers to address issues relating to ageism – in particular, the inauthentic and sometimes clichéd portrayals of different age groups within current UK ad creative.
As the UK broadcaster with the youngest viewing demographic, Channel 4 hopes the campaign will modernize the representation of all age groups by depicting them in a non-stereotypical way – and also demonstrating intersectionality of age with gender, sexuality, disability or ethnicity.
This year’s winning campaign, pitched by representatives from Tena and AMV BBDO, utilizes a storyline to educate viewers about the realities of menopause. The prize totals £1m of Channel 4 commercial advertising airtime for the campaign and, new for the 2021 edition of the award, an additional £100k bespoke social media campaign created by the broadcaster’s in-house digital content team 4Studio. Both elements are expected to launch early in 2022.
Meta Redstedt, global brand and communications director of Tena, said of the campaign: “At Tena we’ve made it our mission to challenge negative representations of female aging, and in this campaign we will redefine what it means to be a woman going through the menopause.
“With Channel 4’s partnership, we’ll inspire change in households across the nation, creating an important and new cultural narrative for menopause. We’re absolutely delighted to be the recipients of this award alongside AMV BBDO.”
The campaign follows recent research commissioned by Channel 4, which found TV adverts in the UK to be primarily focused on younger characters. Older people are often left out, with 29% featuring characters over the age of 50 and only 12% of them cast in lead roles.
It also found that age representation differed between genders. Male characters are more likely to be older, while women are younger and often used for brand building. Older women, meanwhile, feel they are more likely to be portrayed in a stereotypical way.
Channel 4 launched its ground-breaking award in 2016 to encourage the advertising industry to embrace inclusive creative campaigns and extend Channel 4’s leadership in diversity beyond its editorial content and into the ad breaks.
Previous winning campaigns have focused on disability (Maltesers), mental health (Lloyds Bank), the portrayal of women in the media (RAF), the lack of representation and stereotyping of the LGBT+ community (Starbucks) and Black, Asian & Minority Ethnic Culture (EA Sports).