DE&I recalibration from the likes of Amazon, Meta, Publicis sparks questions around faltering commitments

Earlier in the week, Publicis Groupe reportedly cut its DE&I teams, including removing its chief diversity officer Geraldine White from her post of the past four years. Per AdAge’s reporting, White will continue to work with the holding company on a consultant basis as the company is in the process of hiring White’s successor. Meanwhile, McDonald’s is restructuring its approach to diversity by retiring its supplier diversity efforts, rebranding its diversity team as the “Global Inclusion Team” and sunsetting the concept of setting “aspirational representation goals” to instead focus on embedding inclusion practices into everyday operations. (Meta and McDonald’s didn’t respond to Digiday’s requests for comment. When asked for comment, a spokesperson for Amazon provided Castleberry’s memo to Digiday.)

Call it a pendulum effect. On the heels of George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, companies scrambled to establish diversity programs, building out teams with chief diversity officers and posting solidarity statements to social media. In June 2020, McDonald’s made two $500,000 donations to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and National Urban League civil rights organizations. Around the same time, Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was building out products to advance racial justice, like a voter hub alongside its get-out-the-vote efforts, amongst other diversity and inclusion initiatives. Agencies promised to celebrate Juneteenth, which was made a legal public holiday after President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth bill into law in 2021.

Now, seemingly, the pendulum is swinging back in the opposite direction with companies increasingly announcing plans to embed diversity into day-to-day operations as part of continued commitments to inclusion rather than standalone initiatives. It could be argued that it’s a matter of businesses doing what they need to survive in a highly polarized society, similar to the reaction to Floyd’s murder when companies promised their initial diversity goals and programs.

These announcements, however, come at a time when companies are facing mounting pressure from conservative voices to pull back on those initiatives. The shift has left multicultural agencies grappling with the fallout and DE&I practitioners questioning the intentions of this new era. It’s left marketing experts questioning whether this is a true step toward progress or knee-jerk reaction to an increasingly polarized cultural landscape.

“Every business [evolves to survive], but it’s a misunderstanding to devalue the power of these [multicultural] audiences just because the changing winds, or whatever the comms narratives might be at a given moment, are shifting,” said, Alphonzo Terrell, co-founder and CEO of Spill, a nearly two-year-old social media app geared toward diverse and inclusive audiences.

Since 2023, there has been a mounting backlash against marketing campaigns and diversity efforts deemed “woke” from conservative watchdog groups like America First Legal or conservative activist Robby Starbuck. In response, companies like Walmart, Toyota and John Deere, have either walked back DE&I initiatives or reframed them, moving away from flagship targets and instead embedding inclusion more deeply into business operations. Similar to McDonald’s, when John Deere announced its tweaked commitment to diversity, the company stated that “diversity quotas and pronoun identification have never been and are not company policy.” But in the same announcement, it said it would “continue to track and advance the diversity of our organization.”

DE&I practitioners, however, question whether the so-called reframing is truly about progress or a quiet step away from it, especially with the incoming Trump administration expected to lead a culture that frowns upon DE&I efforts that have been made in the last five years.

Marc Wilson, evp, executive director of strategic inclusion at FCB Chicago ad agency, said companies that are now touting inclusion efforts in everyday work need to show proof, like continued investments in multicultural marketing efforts and diversity programs. Notably, metrics to show progress within diversity and inclusion efforts has been something the industry has struggled to standardize even before the backlash.

Last November, Digiday reported that some multicultural agencies were grappling with companies deprioritizing DEI priorities. In some cases, clients’ DE&I budgets were slashed, thus impacting these client-agency partnerships.

To put numbers to it, multicultural consumers made up nearly 40% of the U.S. population in 2023, according to a report published in the same year by PQ Media, a custom media research firm. Multiethnic media investments, however, only accounted for 5.3% of media spending, per the report.

That’s not to say funding has dried up alongside fading commitments. Per Terrell, Spill has yet to see business slow down or advertisers rescind deals with the platform. (Spill has brought on advertisers like Paramount+, Showtime and CBS, according to Terrell.) By the end of this year, Terrell expects Spill to cross $1 million in annualized revenue. (Terrell did not disclose further revenue figures.)

The proof point will be after Q1 when budgets shake out and ad dollars are spent to reveal if the rebranding of diversity, equity and inclusion was meant to be a progressive step forward or regressive step back, said Kirk McDonald, CEO of Sundial Media Group, holding company for brands like Essence magazine, Afropunk festival and Refinery29. In other words, if the companies retooling their DE&I initiatives are still committed to DE&I, dollars should still continue to be funneled to diverse-owned media as opposed to drying up.

“Because arguably, if we’re going in this direction, you’re going to eliminate multicultural pies and we’re all now going off of the big pie,” McDonald said, “the determinant of what share of that pie you get should be your credibility, your authenticity to these audiences.”

Calls to retain DE&I policies and goals aren’t new. Even if the topic has had a recent, new spotlight. Practitioners have long since said diversity is imperative to business goals and should be treated as such, rather than a matter of morality in hopes to appeal to an ROI-obsessed C-suite.

It just so happens that the so-called evolution of diversity, equity and inclusion is happening amidst polarization and political noise, causing some companies to seemingly react impulsively to changing cultural winds, said Sheryl Daija, founder and CEO of Bridge, a DEI trade organization founded in 2022.

That rebranding, to Daija, matters less than the work. She said, “You can call it whatever you want. At the end of the day, it’s really about the impact, the impact that it has everywhere.”