SANJAY SHABI is a board director at MediaCom, one of the world’s largest media buying agencies, with responsibilities for pan regional offline media. He also heads CultureCom, a specialised and unique unit within the main business, with a core focus on ethnic advertising.
Shabi has worked in the industry for more than three decades, starting out in the multinational Zenith Media in 1990. He joined MediaCom in 2001, and got promoted as a board director three years later, the same year the CultureCom division, then the first of its kind, was
launched. He would get the charge in 2011, providing him with an opportunity to secure his own operation for trying to deliver to advertisers the growing BME consumer market.
Shabi knew that untapped ethnic consumers, whose disposable income was rising every year, were underserved by advertising. The decade since 2011 would see him emerge as a thought leader in ethnic advertising, which seeks to leverage the explosion in the number of ethnically focused content platforms on UK television and radio. Diversity in advertising has “always been a priority,” he comments.
“The question is whether advertisers have done anything to address that.”
Shabi says he has seen a rise in diverse representation in recent years. He believes the momentum of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that swept Britain last year following the death of black American George Floyd in the US has increased the need for inclusivity across advertising.
“I think [the BLM protests] marked a real turning point when people needed to really think about how they addressed diverse audiences.”
Shabi suggests brands to start thinking a little broader than just the one-size-fits-all model of traditional advertising. He co-authored the seminal report The New Britain in 2014, which found that ethnic audiences were 60 per cent more likely to purchase a product if it was advertised in their media. “We are seeing more product development within the digital sphere, a continuing rise in different types of TV stations and the evolution of broadcasted content addressing the needs and interests of Britishbased ethnic groups,” he has said at the time.
Those trends still continue unabated. “I am pleased to say that for some time now, [the data] has been harbouring the ability to reveal the holy grail,i.e. understanding how likely south Asians are to consume mainstream products and services.”
At a time when the share of UK’s minority ethnic population has grown to 14 per cent of the total, and the BME pound is now worth well in excess of £300 billion, mainstream brands cannot afford to ignore this development, a bet Shabi can confidently say he has won.
“A credible business… rests on understanding consumers and where ethnic audiences have a higher propensity to consume certain products and services. Unlock this first, convincingly, and ethnic media will then sell itself.
Sell the audience, not the media,” that’s his take.
