HOW TO WIN H2 PLANNING

How to win h2 planning

Jordan Golding, Head of DEI Planning, DEI, MG OMD 

Every August, Notting Hill Carnival fills west London with around two million people. Black History Month follows in October, then Diwali, then Disability History Month, then Chanukah, all inside the same window our industry spends most of the year preparing for. 

For the communities who hold them, these are amongst the most meaningful moments of the year. They carry a weight that very few commercial moments ever will. And yet in most H2 plans, they completely disappear. I don't think that's indifference, I've sat in enough planning sessions to know how much care goes into H2, and how people genuinely want to get it right. The problem is more likely that the way we build plans was never designed to see these moments in the first place, and so we keep arriving at the same two: Black Friday and Christmas. 

Ethnic minority communities now account for more than one in four people in the UK, rising to around 30% of under-40s, and more than half of London. The Muslim population grew from 2.7 million to 3.9 million between the last two censuses. LGBTQIA+ identification has more than doubled since 2014, and among 16 to 24-year-olds it's now around one in ten. Roughly one in seven adults is neurodiverse.  These groups are no longer projections or emerging segments, they are the audiences already deciding if your brand grows.   

The structural reasons they've been harder to reach are countless. The good news is, the majority of them are solvable. Many multicultural communities have lower affinity and trust in mainstream channels, so even if you’re reaching them, you may not be resonating. Some of it is mechanical: a significant volume of entirely safe LGBTQIA+ content sits behind advertiser keyword blocklists for terms like "same sex marriage", "lesbian" or "drag queen", with content demonetised and brands cut off from the community, perhaps without you even realising it's happening.  

So, when it comes to inclusive planning, I find the more useful question isn't whether these audiences are being reached, it's whether you're reaching them in the moments where they feel most seen. And if you are connecting when it would mean the most to them. On that, most of us have room to improve. 

None of this requires a bigger budget or a separate workstream. It requires asking a different set of questions earlier, ideally before plans for H2 are set.  

Inclusion is a growth strategy, not a compliance exercise 

Inclusive planning still tends to get filed under values, or DEIB. Something which is more of a moral accessory to planning than built in facet of the strategy, which makes it one of the first things to go when budgets tighten. But evidence moved past that some time ago. 

The Unstereotype Alliance's work with Saïd Business School at Oxford researched 392 brands across 58 countries, and undoubtedly found that brands with a strong inclusive marketing strategy deliver 3.46% higher short-term sales and 16.26% higher long-term sales. They're 62% more likely to be a consumer's first choice, with 15% higher loyalty and 54% higher pricing power. Purchase intent runs 25% higher, rising to 59% among 25 to 34-year-olds. Inclusive planning is not category or market specific, the benefits for brands are holistic and broad. Not exactly an 'accessory' brands can afford to cut. 

Spending power also sits alongside it. Households with at least one disabled person represent an estimated £274bn a year, a market most H2 plans never explicitly consider. The gap is measurable too: Channel 4's Mirror on the Industry found disabled people appear in 4% of UK ads against 17.8% of the population, while 77% of people say DEI in advertising matters to them. 

The opportunity for brands here is shifting from avoiding exclusion to actively looking for growth. It's the approach behind our National Databank work with Virgin Media O2, which took Gold for Inclusive Media Strategy at the Media Week Awards. What made that work stand out wasn't a special, separate inclusion budget - it was that inclusion shaped the audience definition, the channel mix and the creative delivery from the first conversation rather than the last. 

Modern Britain is more complex than a demographic segment 

Speaking to diverse audiences alone doesn’t prepare you for how to connect. For that you need to know what these audiences actually respond to, and our latest Belonging in Britain research started with a simple question: what makes you who you are? 

Our findings across both years revealed that our standard industry planning tools make for rather myopic outcomes. Across the thousands of Brits surveyed, we found that what 'makes them them' stood far outside of traditional demographics; family came top, then personality, then passions and interests, where people grew up, and friends. Age and gender fall below this and social class sat near-bottom of the list. Meaning that the spine of pretty much every audience demographic definition in this industry does not reflect how audiences identify themselves. 

That’s something for planners to pay attention to; plans are being built around the attributes people say aren't the most important to them, then people wonder why the work doesn't land. I am by no means suggesting abandoning demographics, age and income remain useful for sizing and buying. But the fact remains that they describe a population instead of a person.   

As an example, if you were to look at two 34-year-old ABC1 women, one in Leeds and one in Croydon, you would probably find that they share a cell in a spreadsheet and almost nothing else. Precision has got very good at finding both; it hasn't made us better at knowing what matters to either. 

If identity is built from people, passions, personality and place, the practical question is how do brands and marketers tap into those things with their audiences? Overwhelmingly, the answer is through the communities they are a part of. 68% of people say their communities are important to their identity, and 38% say they're essential to who they are. The mindsets within them are highly valuable too; 96% trust the opinions of the people around them, and 86% have taken real-world action off the back of something they saw or heard there. 

For the planners amongst us, I have no doubt this gets ears pricking: a high-trust, high-influence, high-conversion environment. Given that as an industry we spend enormous sums trying to foster trust, loyalty and belonging, it’s invaluable to know it already exists, and people are in it voluntarily. 

What stands out, and is particularly interesting for H2 planning, is where people feel that belonging most strongly. Religious groups come top, with 47% of members reporting a strong sense of belonging. Ethnic and cultural heritage groups follow at 44%, sports supporter groups at 42%. Three different worlds sharing the same emotional architecture of ritual, meaning and inherited allegiance. Worlds which, our research shows, provide broad and appeal; spanning genders, regions, ages, and ethnicities. At times, even uniting a nation in scarce, shared moments of appointment viewing and pride.  

What's more, they offer a rare, predictable ‘footprint’ and a calendar of highly attentive, positive moments in which brands can go beyond just reaching people to become part of these modern rituals that cross divides and build belonging with audiences. 

From broad reach to cultural relevance 

Reaching an audience vs understanding one are different disciplines, and as an industry we've become far better at the first than the second. Which is why inclusive planning is really a question of context rather than representation alone. Representation asks who appears in the work, whilst context asks whether the environment you've bought is one where this audience feels safe, whether the voices carrying your message are ones they already trust, and whether the moment means anything to them. You can be perfectly representative in your casting and still land somewhere nobody's listening, or somewhere that could elicit the wrong perception. 

Inside the budget you already have, this really comes down to two things. 

The first is conscious inclusivity: moving from unconscious exclusion to deliberate inclusion in the plan as it stands. Reviewing segmentations for underserved groups. Checking whether reach and frequency among diverse audiences match your national delivery (spoiler, they often don't), and testing how creative lands across communities before it runs, not after. 

The second is deliberate diversity: where growth mapping shows a real opportunity, going further with partners and creators who already have saliency there. Not because it's the right thing to do (though it is) but because borrowed trust is the fastest way into an environment where trust is the currency. 

Neither of these needs more budget, but they do both need the thinking to happen early. 

H2's biggest missed opportunity is sitting in the calendar 

Alongside Carnival, Black History Month, Diwali, Disability History Month and Chanukah sit Navratri, Rosh Hashanah, South Asian Heritage Month, Transgender Awareness Month and Dia de los Muertos. The ‘Golden Half’ is one of the densest cultural periods in the British year, and most still only plan to engage with a fraction of it. There are a number of implications that this has for Britain and its brands.  

The first is that these are increasingly shared moments rather than minority ones. Diwali, Ramadan and Easter are all now observed well beyond the faith communities they came from. 

The second is that Christmas never stopped mattering to these audiences. Our analysis of ONS data puts multicultural consumer spend on Christmas gifting at around £1.7bn a year, and LGBTQIA+ spend at around £758m. This was never either/or. Planning for other cultural moments means arriving at Christmas having already built a relationship. The moments you choose to build that connection with are a real brand decision, rather than a checklist of where to be seen. In tightly bonded communities, brands are judged on what they contribute rather than what they claim. 

Five checks before you sign off 

1. Have we identified all of our growth audiences, or only the ones our tools make easy to find?  

2. Are we planning around communities as well as demographics?  

3. Which cultural moments genuinely matter to our audience, and which are we better staying out of?  

4. Do our media and creator partners reflect Modern Britain?  

5. And does our creative represent the people we're trying to connect with? 

Conclusion 

The marketers I see doing this best have moved past asking "how do we avoid getting this wrong?" They're asking something more useful: who are we not growing with, and why? 

Winning H2 was never about reaching more people. It’s about understanding the moments that matter the most, and shaping your media in reflection of them. Inclusive marketing isn't a specialist consideration anymore, for those willing to show up authentically, it's a huge competitive advantage, if done in the correct way. 

We are already seeing strong opportunities to apply these insights with clients. To explore how Belonging in Britain 2026, and our Inclusive Planning work can inform your planning and strategy, please do reach out.  

To explore Belonging in Britain’s Key Insights and get your copy of the research, click here.