Vaishnavi Krishnan.
Vaishnavi Krishnan, Business director, Hatched
My perspective on media and audiences has been shaped by a career, and a life, lived across markets. Born in India, I grew up in Dubai, completed university in the United States, and eventually made my way to Australia. Along the way, I picked up one critical lesson: audiences are never one size fits all.
It's a lesson the industry urgently needs to hear. According to the Unstereotype Alliance, inclusive advertising delivers 3.5% higher short-term sales and 16% better longer-term sales compared to non-inclusive campaigns. The business case is clear. The execution, however, still has a long way to go.
One of my earliest and most formative lessons came during the global rollout of the Dove Real Beauty campaign. In many Western markets, it was celebrated for its raw and authentic portrayal of women. In the Middle East, where I was working at the time, it struggled to resonate. Audiences there were still accustomed to the highly polished, carefully styled beauty imagery that had dominated advertising for decades. The message itself wasn't wrong; the market simply wasn't ready for it in the same way.
That experience taught me something I've carried ever since: a global idea doesn't automatically translate into a universal response. Every market, and every cultural group within it, interprets messaging through its own lens.
When I moved to Australia, I was struck by how often that lesson goes unlearned here. There's a persistent assumption that audiences engage with the same platforms, the same publishers, and the same cultural moments.
We plan from the perspective of how the "average Australian" consumes content, but that person doesn't exist. Australia is one of the most multicultural societies in the world, and despite what Pauline Hanson would have us believe, that is something to build strategies around, not shy away from.
Increasing migration continues to reshape consumer behaviour, language, and cultural reference points. Media consumption habits vary significantly across cultural groups, languages, regions, and communities. This is before we even account for regional Australians, whose culture, economic drivers, and identities differ substantially from the metro lens through which most strategies are built.
When brands misunderstand the audiences they're speaking to, messaging can feel forced or tone-deaf. But when teams genuinely understand the cultural nuances of their audiences, advertising has a real power to inspire culture rather than just reflect it.
A true audience-first strategy requires more than data; it requires diverse perspectives in the room. When teams include people with different cultural backgrounds, regional experiences, and lived realities, assumptions get challenged and blind spots become visible.
According to Diversity Council Australia research, inclusive organisations are 10 times more likely to be highly effective and four times more likely to be innovative, while delivering strong commercial outcomes. Cultural fluency isn't just the right thing to do; it's a competitive advantage.
DE&I shouldn't be a box-ticking exercise reserved for culturally relevant festivals or awareness months. It needs to be embedded in everyday strategic thinking, built into the planning stage rather than retrofitted later. That means expanding recruitment and mentorship pipelines to bring in people with genuinely different lived experiences, because the conversation in the room shapes the work that goes out into the world.
So forget the imagined "average Australian consumer". Whether you're planning a campaign, briefing creative, or thinking about who's in the room making those decisions, dig deeper, embrace specificity, and let the real diversity of this country shape your thinking. You might be surprised by just how effective that can be.