In recent years, there has been a concerted effort by Marketers to include diverse-owned publishers as part of their media buys after having been previously overlooked from lack of scale.

From 2020 to 2023, ad spend committed to diverse-owned media grew exponentially, increasing from $400 million to $1.9 billion, according to ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing.

A rise in demand to advertise with diverse publishers has created a need for infrastructure to accommodate an increase in supply, which leading ad tech company Kargo was more than happy to provide.

“Marketers are very much interested in partnering with diverse media, but unfortunately, the demand exceeded the supply,” said Jeannine Shao Collins, Chief Client Officer at Kargo.

“When we talk about inclusive investment and economic empowerment, we partner with companies like Kargo because they can help clients reach different audiences and achieve scale for diverse creators,” said Danisha Lomax, EVP, Head of Client Inclusivity & Impact at Digitas.

“Inclusive investment is not a separate product or solution,” Lomax continued. “It’s actually infused in everything we do, and Kargo helps us design a systematized approach to driving growth and inclusive impact.”

“Diverse creators have a tough time getting exposure beyond certain communities,” said Shao Collins. “Our goal is to really amplify and give diverse communities exposure on the open web to people who may not normally see their content, and the way we can support diverse creators and their content is through our technology and through our platform.”

Evolution of the Multicultural Content Amplifier

Palette, which will launch in early 2025, is more than just a new distribution tool; it is helping push the MCA into new ad formats.

“Understanding that so much of the content today is about sight and sound, we think this is really important to enable those content types for diverse creators and audiences,” said Shao Collins.

Palette, which is designed to meet the needs of campaigns focused on multicultural objectives, will be available to all Kargo clients; however, for campaigns with smaller budgets, Kargo will offer its new Cultural Collective plan, which encourages brands to invest in diverse-owned media by offering audience targeting, content amplification and high-indexing sites.