Purple Goat: Brands increasingly leaning in to Paralympics
The Media Leader Interview
“We are seeing a more joined-up, unified approach between the Olympics and the Paralympics.”
Dom Hyams, global client director at WPP-owned inclusive marketing agency Purple Goat, thinks brands have become increasingly interested in sponsoring both tournaments. The Paris Paralympic Games are starting on 28 August.
He tells The Media Leader: “Of the sponsors of the Olympics, I’d say a high percentage are now also sponsors of the Paralympics. We don’t see those conversations as siloed, which is great.”
The benefit of advertising against both the Olympics and the Paralympics, according to Hyams, is that it helps to broaden the appeal of the latter by normalising the fact that it isn’t just a competition to be enjoyed by disabled people.
“In the same way that I’m a fan of the Olympics and disabled people can be fans of the Olympics, we also want to see a diversity of representation around the Paralympics and that not just being for disabled people as well,” he adds. “We want just naturally inclusive campaigns across the board and to not silo or ghettoise either of them.”
Moral case and business case
Purple Goat was founded by CEO Martyn Sibley in April 2020 to fill what he saw as a gap in media representation for disabled people — in both ads themselves and the agencies that produce them. Given that for the first few months the startup was essentially a one-man band, Sibley worked with influencer marketing agency Goat to develop Purple Goat as a sub-brand (purple being the colour of the disabled community).
Hyams joined as head of strategy a year later and became global client director in 2024. When WPP acquired Goat in 2023, Purple Goat was part of the package. Current clients include Braun, Starling Bank, Strongbow, and Tesco.
“There’s a very large number of disabled people in the world that represent a large consumer group,” Sibley points out.
Indeed, an estimated 1.3bn people — or about 16% of the world’s population — experience a significant disability, according to the World Health Organization.
But Sibley tells The Media Leader that, in 2020, just 0.06% of advertising featured disabled people.
“From a purely advertising/marketing perspective, our mission as an agency is to close that gap and not have this under-indexing,” he explains. “But it’s not just the moral or the legal thing. It’s a growth driver. There’s a business case.”
Channel 4 creates ‘most accessible’ sponsorship idents yet for Paralympics 2024
Hyams admits brands still maintain cautious attitudes when seeking to appeal directly to disabled people out of an anxiety over the potential negative effect.
“I suppose that fear of doing something wrong, not doing it the right way, being berated by the community, is a very real concern,” he says. Thus, Purple Goat’s mission has broadened to include “handholding” brands through the process to ensure the disabled community is accurately and positively represented.
“For us, it’s about building comfort and confidence in brands to be that bit more progressive in the way they talk about disability,” Hyams adds. “Us educating them is part of that process.”
The benefit, according to the pair, is improved brand sentiment and uplift. But advertisers must be cautious not to “purplewash” through the creation of one-off, tokenistic campaigns, they warn.
Sibley stresses: “It can’t be vacuous and disingenuous and not authentic. It needs to be a long-term strategy of: are our products and services accessible? Are we hiring a diverse workforce? And is our marketing representative of different communities?”
‘Pinch-me moment’
Purple Goat’s “bread and butter” services are content creation and influencer marketing campaigns. But the agency also works on a consultancy basis for clients on their general messaging to disabled people, such as through providing insights about the community and ideas for making their websites more accessible and general communications strategy more inclusive.
According to the duo, demand for their services has grown over time thanks to a greater emphasis post-Covid-19 on the need to reach out to more diverse communities.
“There’s a ‘pinch-me moment’ of sorts where we’re now working with brands that four years ago we could have only dreamt of,” says Hyams. “But the unfortunate reality is that we exist as an agency because there isn’t the diversity of lived experience in both the agencies and the brands that we are working with.
“In an ideal world, I suppose you’d say that we wouldn’t exist, because if you had full diversity and representation across all brands and agencies, this stuff would just be happening by default.”
While Purple Goat was still in its relative infancy during the Paralympics in Tokyo in 2021, Hyams — who previously worked on production teams for the Paralympics in 2012 and 2016 — says brand involvement in the competition “isn’t something that is as rare now” compared with London 2012.
At that Paralympics, Channel 4 debuted its controversial but eye-catching “Meet the Superhumans” campaign. Hyams believes it was a “big bang” in terms of breaking through the barrier of featuring disabled people in media.
Channel 4 drops ‘superhuman’ narrative in 2024 Paralympics campaign
For the 2024 tournament, Purple Goat consulted on Channel 4’s new campaign, “Considering What?” — the first Channel 4 Paralympics campaign since 2012 to not feature the “superhumans” idea. The work aims to show that there are no “caveats” to Paralympians’ athleticism and achievements.
In addition, the agency has worked alongside Channel 4 in consultation on improved accessibility features for its coverage, such as the use of captions.
Hyams calls Channel 4 “the gold standard” for running ads with disabled representation, estimating that disabled people are included in around 4% of the broadcaster’s ads. That is significantly more than the fraction of 1% done by others, though still well below global representation.
Another Purple Goat client is ParalympicsGB and the agency has worked to support the team with a forthcoming influencer campaign debuting during the Paralympics for its “Every Body Moves” platform, which directs individuals with disabilities to sports and physical activities available to them in their local area.
Open dialogue
Apart from Channel 4 and ParalympicsGB, Hyams thinks brands have become much more confident in their capacity to find diverse talent and insert “progressive narratives” into their media, even if there is more work to do to continue improving representation of disabled people in media.
“Four, eight, 12 years ago, [brands] might drop someone [disabled] in casting and that would be the extent of what we would see,” he says. “However, I think people are on the journey now and they’re learning that you need that lived experience to help shape the best result behind the camera.”
Hyams adds that a small cottage industry has popped up to aid advertisers in their communications. “There’s more organisations that look through the lens of different protected characteristics that are becoming more prominent,” he continues. “And people are realising they need to lean on these communities, these organisations, to help them deliver best-in-class work.”
And Hyams’ advice to advertisers? Engage in completely open dialogue; there are no wrong questions and no judgement.
He explains: “We know the more comfortable clients are, the more barriers they’re willing to break.”
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