Influencer Diversity and Inclusion: Why We’re Casting 50% Diverse Creators for Nike

To be honest, we’re behind our deadline for this article. This was originally planned to go out as a part of our Black History Month content calendar, but then, we were like, eh…why, though? We left any sort of performative allyship back in early 2020.

So here we are. It’s March 2021 and we’re still talking about Black Lives Matter. We’re also talking about the rampant Asian hate crimes and Xenophobia in the U.S. We love and celebrate our diverse influencer community and are privileged to connect high-performing influencers from the Black and Asian Community with brands like Nike. Considering that 21% of our team are Asian and 12% are Black, it’s important to us that we can see our communities represented in our work, too.

ICYMI, we instituted a 30% minimum racial diversity policy for all casted campaigns last year. Diversity and inclusion matters and it makes our jobs easy when brands like Nike are so embedded with diversity in their DNA that we end up casting over 50% diverse creators without even thinking much about it. Though we acknowledge that this isn’t the case for most of the brands that we work with, we are certainly entering an era where diversity and inclusivity is encouraged if not required by most brands. We love to see this.

Plus, peep that Nike drip! Our campaign reached 8.4M viewers with Black and Asian content creators leading the pack. Boom.

• Mandy Rose’s Must Haves from Nike
• Johnny Thai’s Top Nike Items For Streetwear Outfits
• Briana Monique Talks Curly Hair Gone Wrong and Nike Try On Gone Right
• Rio P’s Nike Holiday 2020 Shopping Gift Guide

It doesn’t stop there. Investing in BIPOC and diverse talent yields better business results, too. When we looked back on 2020 holiday shopping season, we found:

• Black influencers drove the most conversions of all casted influencers
• Black influencers conversion rate increased by nearly 4x upon greater inclusion in our casted campaigns:

• Hispanic influencers drove the most online traffic to retailers than any other racial group
• Asian influencers drove the most sales overall

Our recent highlight in WWD’s Beauty Inc. newsletter dives even deeper. For beauty, we found that influencers of color garnered:

• 3x higher click-through rate than their peers for our Sephora Holiday Campaign
• 4x higher view-through rate and 2x higher engagement rate than the industry average for our Giorgio Armani Beauty campaign

These stories are significant in our discussions with brands on why we have our 30% diversity policy. Our efforts to recruit, retain, and cast diverse influencers are intentional. If you’re a brand looking to diversify your influencer marketing campaigns or are a BIPOC-owned business interested in partnering with diverse talent, please do get in touch.

For more information on MagicLinks’ commitment to leaving the world better than we found it, please visit our Living Into Our Commitment 2020 Report.