Andraéa LaVant and LaVant Consulting began working with Google in 2020. When the partnership formed, Google was representing just 1% of disabled people authentically across

their marketing and both parties wanted to usher in a new era of representation, especially the intersecting identities of disabled representation. This started with critical foundational work. To date, LaVant Consulting has trained over 30% of Google marketers — with a goal of 100%. Because of this, Google has successfully increased the representation of disabled people in their creative work from 1% to 6% with a strong commitment of 15% by 2025 (reflecting the number of people globally who have some form of disability).

Andraéa and the LaVant Consulting team went far beyond their initial consulting agreement and over the past few years, the partnership has expanded to include advocacy,

speaking, and performing engagements. Andraéa and her team have ensured Google’s tentpole events and moments were built with accessibility from start to finish and often included Andraéa herself speaking at the event. These include but are not limited to; Google I/O, Google Marketing Live, Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Year in Search, Black Disabled Creatives, ADCOLOR, Google Doodles and Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

But, similar to Google, Andraéa and the LaVant Consulting team believe that the most important aspect of accessibility and disability inclusion is driving the entire industry forward, not just one company, creating opportunities for everyone. One of the most recent efforts between Google and LaVant Consulting, aimed to do just that — move the needle for all,

ushering in a new era on what it means to be disabled and this was the All In Selma Blair and Andraéa LaVant campaign.

In an effort to share cross-industry learnings, including specific Google marketing use cases, LaVant Consulting and other industry experts worked in partnership with Google to launch the first-ever Accessible marketing playbook on All In, Google’s inclusive marketing toolkit, providing best practices for building creative with accessibility and disability inclusion from start to finish.The playbook was launched at the Cannes Lions Festival in June of 2022 where Selma Blair teased the upcoming creative campaign. In July 2022, Google launched the Andraéa

LaVant and Selma Blair video, endorsing the Accessible marketing playbook, discussing ways this can help the entire industry build more inclusive creative content for all, while using the creative as an example in itself for ways to build with and for the disabled community, ensuring disability is in front of and behind the camera.The campaign was hugely successful, reaching over 33 million people, 125,000 new unique visitors to the All In site and landed 32 press articles helping to spread the message of creating disability-inclusive media.Simply put, this would not have been possible without the partnership of Google and LaVant Consulting, both of which feel as though they’re just getting started. As one of the core principles identified by Google and LaVant Consulting states, accessibility is a never-ending journey, not a box to check!