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Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards Grand Jury
Vice President, Multicultural Business Acceleration
The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G)
BIO
Lela Coffey, VP - Multi-Cultural Business Acceleration, helps P&G to serve multicultural consumers across P&G’s enterprise. With over 20 years of experience, Lela has led some of P&G’s iconic brands including Olay and Tampax. Her passion for inclusive marketing sets a high impact bar, challenging others to deliver meaningfully for consumers and communities. An advocate for developing capability, Lela invests substantial time supporting teams, including fostering understanding of the impact diversity can have on organizations. Lela created P&G’s 4R Framework for Equality & Inclusivity, which is used across P&G to aid brands in authentically connecting with traditionally underserved consumers.
Q&A with Lela Coffey
What makes great marketing today?
Great marketing is work that engages the consumer and gets them to stop, pay attention, and feel rewarded enough for what they saw/experienced that they take action. Communication has become so fragmented. The consumer is bombarded from every direction constantly. Getting their attention is getting harder and harder and simply reaching them is no longer sufficient – it must engage them. Great marketing is rooted in deep consumer insights translated into a great idea. This is what will make it successful, because it enables connection, engagement, and break through.
What is the one cultural trend you are watching today?
The significant role that creators are playing. The voice of the brand is not as trusted as it has been in the past, and the voices of creators are playing a massive part in not only engaging consumers and earning their trust, but also acting as a part of their purchase funnel. Learning how to work effectively with a wide range of creators will be a skill that is needed to grow.
In one sentence, what will it take to make an entry worthy of winning a Grand Prize award?
Grand Prize award work will be rooted in a consumer insight brought to life in a distinctive, differentiated, and creative way that causes the target to take action.
What advice would you offer to teams preparing submissions for the ANA Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards?
I would ask them to ensure that they have measurable results that show how consumers/the target responded. Great marketing is only great marketing if it achieves results.
Why do awards programs like ANA Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards matter to the health and progress of the marketing industry?
Great work deserves to be seen, celebrated, and rewarded, which the ANA MC and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards provides a platform to make happen. It also allows great work to be seen by others in the industry. The awards play a big role in driving awareness of great work, drawing attention to lesser known or unseen agencies, creatives, and media suppliers, which could result in more work for them.
An effective performance evaluation framework is critical to show the value a marketing campaign delivered. What type of evaluation framework do you use when assessing marketing efforts? What metrics and KPIs will you expect entrants to provide in their submissions?
I would expect to see metrics like reach/impressions/engagement, sales growth (total and incremental), consumer conversion metrics.
How have your expectations of great marketing evolved over the past few years— and how does that shape how you approach marketing?
It has become increasingly more difficult to get consumer attention with the level of fragmentation that exists today. Reaching a consumer is no longer sufficient. Great marketing must be effective in engaging the consumer so that they are moved to take action. To engage, work must be rooted in insights. The work to uncover insights that are going to connect with the consumer has really come to the forefront as a foundation for great marketing. We must constantly stay in learning mode with consumers to glean those insights. You will rarely if ever find great marketing that is not rooted in a really great insight.
How do you balance creative ambition with commercial accountability in marketing?
Both can be achieved if the work is great work. Creative ambition is rooted in insights translated to a distinctive, heart or mind-opening creative idea will engage the consumer/target because they will feel seen and understood. That foundation provides a lot of room for creative ambition to shape an idea in any number of breakthrough ways. Then, the connection the work makes with the consumer/target from a brilliant idea will drive action, which is what is needed for commercial accountability.
Get to know the 2026 Multicultural and Inclusive Marketing Excellence Awards Grand Jurors.