AN OPEN LETTER: Building Change Together, One Audience at a Time

To our valued Members, Customers and Partners,

Over the past six weeks we have watched the marketing community respond to the call for equality and inclusion in our country, our workplaces and in the messages we deliver every day. As an active industry participant, Alliant has been moved by the solidarity expressed in protests — and in the response from brands, agencies, and platforms. Out of respect for and in acknowledgement of the movement, we believe that it is important that our own community understands where Alliant stands.

First, the entire Alliant team stands united against racism and hate. We strive to build a diverse team and we are actively working to identify where we can do better — increasing diversity, acknowledging and uprooting systemic racism, and better supporting our team members.

Second, we are committed to actively supporting industry efforts, messaging and boycotts that extend beyond commerce and truly impact our society. Brands have impressive reach and the ability to influence millions of consumers. We support marketer’s efforts to present their brands as more socially conscious — and we firmly believe that those strategies will have a greater impact when aligned with an equally conscious audience strategy. While we always strive to help all marketers reach their best possible future customers, we understand true change requires data partners that are as thoughtful with audience strategy as with messaging.

Delivering socially conscious and inclusive audiences requires all of us to think more carefully about the data we use, the rules that govern usage, and the variables we employ during modeling. This is a time to open the “magic boxes” of modeled audiences and talk openly about the inputs that create an audience, and how we can make them more diverse and fair.

Alliant has been energized by the work we have done in the past weeks: developing custom diversity audiences for agencies that reflect brand strategy, helping to guide financial institutions in response to Google’s recent policy changes on nondiscriminatory targeting for lending and housing offers, and helping partners achieve their audience strategy while redirecting spend from Facebook during the boycott.

And while we are proud of meeting these challenges, our goal is to create more of them. As an industry, we need to go beyond creative and boycotts, and challenge ourselves to make every component of marketing fair and inclusive. With the support of our partners, we are prepared to lead in these efforts.

Sincerely,

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