Making sense of diversity in digital messaging | Heather Newman, Creative Maven

Discussing Stupid: A byte-sized podcast on stupid UX

The digital world of today challenges marketers to carefully craft their messaging or risk causing the type of public relations nightmare most don’t want to think about. Now, digital marketers have to not only appreciate the power of the words and imagery they use (or choose not to), but also recognize the need to elevate their messaging to tell a much broader, more diverse story around our brands and products. To help shed some light on some of these challenges, Virgil is joined by the always delightful Heather Newman from Creative Maven. Heather is not only an experience marketer, but is also known for her endeavors in the promotion of better diversity and inclusion in the workplace, especially in the field of technology.

During the discussion, Virgil and Heather ‘get real’ on how the conversation around diversity is changing the digital marketing landscape and share some big (and sometimes funny) screw-ups and successes along the way. In the end, the conversation explores the complex topic, pokes fun at many of our predisposed ideas about how diversity in messaging works (its not just about your person count in images) and gives real world examples on the dos and donts we should all try to follow.

Resources discussed:

• https://www.creativemaven.com/ - Heather's marketing agency
• https://storybrand.com/ - Story Brand
• https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/diversity/ - Microsoft Global Diversity and Inclusion
• https://www.womeninsharepoint.com/ - Women in SharePoint
• https://www.womenintechnology.org/ - Women in Technology
• https://www.womenshistory.org/ - National Women's History Museum