The IPA has today (20th January) appointed Saad Saraf, Founder and CEO of Media Reach, as Chairman of the IPA’s Ethnic Diversity Group. He succeeds Trevor Robinson, OBE.

Saad has spent his career investigating the multicultural landscape of the UK and his agency Media Reach has been a driving force in the growth and development of multicultural marketing in the UK. He has also addressed many conferences and has written several papers on the subject of diversity. One of these papers includes a chapter written for the IPA’s interim report The marketing opportunities for advertisers and agencies in multi-cultural Britain (LINK), published in March 2010.

Says Saad Saraf, Founder and CEO of Media Reach: “The UK is now truly a multicultural country, and will continue to flourish in the face of diversity. The industry needs to quicken its pace to catch up with the changing face of the new society, or risk getting left behind. Not only do we need to accept it, we need to understand and embrace it.”

In 2003 the IPA Ethnic Diversity Group published its first major collaborative work on ethnic diversity which looked at the employment, portrayal and economic value of the ethnic minorities (LINK). A sequel to this report will be published on its tenth anniversary in 2013.