Tesco has won Channel 4’s tenth Diversity in Advertising award with an ad that promises to embed inclusive advertising into every stage of production.

The campaign, created in partnership with agency BBH and EssenceMediacom, will be awarded £1m worth of advertising space across Channel 4’s portfolio next year.

Responding to this year’s brief, ‘Inclusive by Design’, Tesco’s campaign aims to change how people create recipes, so the kitchen “is a place everyone feels welcome”.

The campaign, ‘Inclusive Cooking’, will look to embed inclusivity into every point of the process, from development to production and storyline.

We know as an industry, accessible advertising is still so far behind where it needs to be, so we had no concerns around brands pitching new innovative ideas.

Amy Jenkins, Channel 4

Tesco’s UK marketing director Murray Bisschop says it is a “core value” at Tesco to make “everyone welcome”.

“Our fantastic team is always working to ensure the campaigns we create speak to the diversity of our customers and I am thrilled at the recognition by Channel 4 for this work,” he says.

The winning campaign was chosen from five finalists, which included Morrisons, Maltesers, The Open University and Bodyform. However, Channel 4 will offer the four runner-ups the opportunity to secure match funding to get their entries on air.

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This year’s brief was the same as last year, which Channel 4 sales leader Amy Jenkins says is because there is still work to do to make advertising more accessible.

“We know as an industry, accessible advertising is still so far behind where it needs to be, so we had no concerns around brands pitching new innovative ideas. We were right. Despite the competition being very strong, Tesco, BBH and EssenceMediacom’s campaign stood out to us,” she says.

By repeating this Diversity in Advertising award brief for a consecutive year, Channel 4 is hoping to encourage more brands to innovate advertising to make it possible for all consumers to fully engage with brands.

Channel 4’s latest Mirror On The Industry report released in September found that despite 77% of people agreeing that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is important in advertising, representation across UK ads has largely remained unchanged or worsened over the past six years.

Disabled people appear in 4% of ads, compared with 17.8% of the UK population, a figure unchanged since Channel 4 began tracking representation in 2019.

Channel 4 report finds stagnation in DEI representation across UK TV ads

Meanwhile, the theme is inspired by research from the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), which finds 18 million people in the UK have different experiences of hearing loss and deafness. Likewise, research from the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) reveals around 340,000 people are registered blind or partially sighted.

The Diversity in Advertising competition, designed to promote advertising that is truly representative of diverse communities, has been running since 2016.

Previous themes have included tackling LGBTQIA+ representation, ageism, authentic black, Asian and ethnic minority representation, and pushing back against sexist tropes.

Last year’s winning brand was Currys, which promised to “bring to life” how modern technology can help foster inclusivity.

The ad, ‘Sigh of Relief’ focused on the in-store experience of three customers with accessibility needs when shopping for tech appliances, which has generated a sales ROI of 23:1, according to Channel 4.