2023 Winner

New Canadian Media’s “MISSING” campaign, developed by Barrett and Welsh, aimed to raise awareness of the need for diversity in Canadian newsrooms and the urgent need for funds to sustain its award-winning work. 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. New Canadian Media, a non-profit immigrant journalism news organization, wanted to correct this diversity deficit. Through its fundraising campaign – deployed via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn and leveraging Giving Tuesday and the giving season - New Canadian Media appealed to donors’ sense of justice to raise funds and create 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 engage and provoke a response immediately: the campaign was successful in achieving its objectives, with a 22.3% engagement rate and 1,188 link clicks.

Credits

Gavin Barrett, Chief Creative Officer
Cyril Kirian, Senior Copywriter
Arjun Kumar, Copywriter
Jaideep Mahajan, Art Director
Jaideep Mahajan, Brett Luft, Rhea Lisondra, Kaitlyn Smith, production