Workforce Inclusion Award Winner
Leo Burnett’s Inclusivity Product Council
Leo Burnett creates business value by solving real, human problems. In 2020 we stood up the Inclusivity Product Council (IPC) as a response to a period of intense cultural change with the goal of creating culturally fluent, relevant, and empathic work that reflected our community’s diverse identities.
We continued leading the industry in 2022 by evolving HumanKind—our strategic approach and operating system that puts our philosophy—“what helps humans helps business”—into action every day. In fewer than three years, IPC grew from 21 local participants to a global team of 45 multicultural, cross-discipline council members across all backgrounds, departments, and levels throughout the Publicis Groupe network, representing many nuanced identities such as gender, gender expression, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation, and any hyphenate therein. Our evolution included the expansion of internal team-based learnings to eternally published guides, playbooks, and trainings for clients and their teams.
The IPC has quickly expanded around the globe, offering a lens of sensitivity and inclusion throughout the creative development process to identify and eliminate bias on matters that can range from harmful stereotypes or tropes and insensitive or monolithic concepts to inclusive casting and production practices—in real-time and over time, seeking out the nuanced lived experiences of our own agency community for the betterment of our creative product.
The council support brands, agencies and agency teams that want to move from surface-level representation to deeper cultural resonance, demonstrate cultural fluency, positively impact work and processes, and commit to work that is best-in-industry, best-in-culture, and changes human behavior.
Fueled by curiosity and a collective desire to produce great work, the agency initiates open dialogue, conversation, and constructive feedback mechanisms that fuel authentic work that is more reflective of the world we live in and better effectively resonates with diverse audiences - accelerating our cultural agility and helps our clients grow by moving from representation to resonance in their creative products.
Today, IPC has reviewed over 130 creative executions from over 80 brands from across the world. In year one, we reviewed 50 inputs of creative work and in year three, we have already reviewed half of this amount of work in our first four months of operations.
Much more than a review engine, the IPC enriches our work, fuels our growth and empowers our people, as told by clients and members:
“Your guidance helped to ensure the campaign read as an homage versus a parody, and it worked! The public is loving it. Needless to say, you’re all a huge part of why we’re getting a 🔥🔥🔥 response. A million thank yous in helping us navigate this with precision and authenticity.” —Groupe Client Lead and ECD
“As a queer person, it’s been so empowering to be a part of a space where my POV on LGBTQ+ inclusion in the work matters and is taken seriously.” —IPC Council Member
Mosaic Award 2023 Winners