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