Leading passion agency and digital talent and entertainment PR agency announce a working partnership committed to promoting Black culture year-round
M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment has formed a strategic partnership with Digital Talent & Entertainment PR Agency VAMP, the UK’s first agency to focus solely on the representation of Black digital talent and black audiences.
The announcement follows M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment’s ongoing commitment to enabling brands to step up and make passions more inclusive. To inform their inclusion work, the agency has created an ‘Inclusion Alliance’, a series of strategic partnerships with key organisations that they work closely with to help guide and shape their thinking and execution, ensuring authenticity reigns and the work has maximum impact. VAMP will join this alliance, with other partners including culture change experts Utopia, social purpose music platform Limitless and the Trans Creative Collective, among others.
For their first joint project, VAMP & M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, have announced a pledge titled ‘Beyond Black History Month’, an actionable commitment to helping brands promote Black history and culture in meaningful ways throughout the year. Launching in Black History Month, the pledge invites brands to join M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment and VAMP to celebrate and authentically incorporate Black culture into their internal cultures and external comms year-round and long term.
The pledge will provide brands with resources across five key pillars to ensure authentic representation of Black culture sits at the heart of brands’ activity beyond the traditional month celebrating Black History in October. These pillars include influencers and talent, cultural moments, community and the celebration of Black history and stories. Together the agencies will create a series of complementary assets to help brands in their journey to inclusion, such as a black culture calendar, ‘most influential talent’ list from the inaugural Black Influencer Awards and informative events with key black cultural figures.
Earlier this year, M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment formalised its diversity, equity, and inclusion expertise, by launching ‘Step Up’, a dedicated offer working with brands leveraging passions to use their cultural influence and access to audiences, to tackle barriers to inclusion and representation in passions.
The agency has been responsible for many purpose-led campaigns in passions, including the ‘Where Everyone Plays’ for Coca-Cola, a celebration of diversity within the Premier League, ‘It All Starts With A Chance’ for the Barclays x Girls Football Schools Partnership, and the powerful ‘Resetting the dancefloor’ campaign for Ballantine’s True Music platform.
Jodie Fullagar, co-MD at M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment leads the agency’s DE&I strategy and Step Up expertise. She comments, “We believe collaboration and partnership is the key to making truly representative work, so we’re extremely excited to be working with the brilliant team at VAMP in this joint venture. They really are at the forefront of black culture and more importantly, they understand what authenticity looks like for brands within this space. The combination of our big brand, passion platform and creative storytelling expertise, their deep-rooted knowledge of black culture, and our shared commitment to improving representation, means we can drive real change through the work we do for our clients, and beyond.”
Christina Okorocha, co-founder of VAMP adds, “As a specialist agency, the last five years has allowed us to be regarded as the go-to agency for various aspects of black culture. We focus on this space all year round and it’s seen through our work in authentic, creative and amplified ways. Black History Month is a wonderful time to celebrate black stories and communities but we want to see these stories told and communities highlighted outside of October too.
“Whilst our work and growth speaks volumes for itself, we believe that being able to partner up with a formidable entity like M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment on this pledge will further our mission to highlight more underrepresented voices in the advertising and marketing sector. Together, we believe this commitment will be the start of long-term change and further representation without fear or boundaries across the industry.”
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