Canadian Heavy Mettle 🇨🇦

The Problem

According to studies by the Canadian Association of Journalists in 2021 and 2022, only 21% of Canadian newsrooms employed visible minorities or Indigenous journalists in a top three leadership role. White journalists accounted for 78% of Canadian newsrooms, while 90% had no Latin, Middle Eastern or mixed-race journalists. In 2021, two out of five immigrant and refugee journalists worked as freelancers, restricted to small community media outlets or typecast as “community or minority” reporters.

The Idea

New Canadian Media, a non-profit immigrant journalism news organization, wanted to correct this diversity deficit. Through its fundraising campaign and leveraging Giving Tuesday New Canadian Media created awareness of the inequities in Canadian news reporting. With creative designed to shock readers with its attention-grabbing headlines and intriguing text, and borrowing the visual language of a missing person poster, it was able to provoke a response immediately: the campaign was successful in achieving its objectives, with a 22.3% engagement rate and 1,188 link clicks.

1xGold; 3xSilver at The Marketing Awards