Currys has won Channel 4’s 2024 Diversity in Advertising award with a promise to “bring to life” how modern technology can help foster inclusivity.

The campaign, created in partnership with agency AMV BBDO, will be awarded £1m worth of advertising space across Channel 4’s portfolio next year. Responding to this year’s theme of ‘Inclusive by Design’, campaign ‘The Sigh of Relief’ aims to showcase the relief disabled customers feel when their needs are immediately understood in safe spaces.

Currys brand and marketing director Dan Rubel says the retailer will bring the campaign to life as part of its ‘Beyond Techspectations‘ brand platform, with the goal of being “educational and entertaining”.

“In the real world, our colleagues help disabled customers every day, bringing to life how the tech we sell can make a real difference, including through the specific lens of peoples’ disabilities,” he says.

“In modern tech, there are often helpful features that are not so obvious without chatting to a real life human expert.”

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Eleven advertising leaders and charity representatives selected Currys and AMV BBDO’s campaign pitch from a pool of shortlisted finalists.

The other finalists – McDonald’s and Leo Burnett, V&A and Adam & Eve/DDB, Open University and Havas, and Motability Operations and VCCP – are being offered the opportunity to secure match funding to get their entries on air.

Channel 4 head of sales and chair of judges, Victoria Appleby, describes this year’s competition as “very strong”.

“Helping the industry to improve the accessibility of advertising is hugely important to us at Channel 4 and we wanted to allow brands a chance to reflect and take the positive action that is so sorely needed to ensure advertising is truly inclusive by design,” she adds.

The campaigns were evaluated based on how effectively they reached visually and hearing-impaired audiences, how well they considered representation, their use of inclusive media beyond TV, and whether the idea “feels right” for the brand and its creative execution.

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Inclusive by Design will also be the theme for next year’s Diversity in Advertising award.

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.

Channel 4 Sales’ own research found that if more ads use inclusive techniques they can reach an additional 14 million people across the UK.

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 winner skincare brand E45 vowed to use the money awarded to create work that will “drive long-term, positive change in public attitudes” towards LGBTQIA+ communities.

In May this year, the business launched ‘This Is Me. This Is My Space’, a campaign intended to alleviate some of the hostility faced by the trans community through “empathetic, human storytelling”.