Virtue, the agency powered by VICE Media Group, builds brands from inside culture. A full-service strategic and creative agency with industry-leading expertise, Virtue helps brands find an authentic voice at the epicentre of culture.

With a presence in 17 cities across 13 countries, Virtue is a ‘borderless’ agency, putting together bespoke teams of people with diverse skills, backgrounds, and perspectives. Virtue works with brands like Coca-Cola, HBO, Logitech, P&G, General Mills, H&M, Volkswagen, McDonald’s, eToro, Red Bull, and Beats.

In creating this work and telling these stories, it is vital that we foster a culture which reflects our values. VIRTUE strives to be a torchbearer for the industry when it comes to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion efforts within our workplace, creating a community where diversity thrives and people can be their best and most authentic selves. We want our people to bring 100% of themselves to work.

We centre this work around four pillars: People, Culture, Systems and Standards. Our commitments are laid out in full for our teams to view at any time on a company DEI dashboard, which tracks our progress with this work. This includes calibrated performance management to be more objective and reduce bias, mandatory management and inclusive leadership training, and new Code of Conduct and Respect in the Workplace policies.

We are focused on empowering leaders and managers to act inclusively and hold their teams to do the same. The focus on DEI comes from the top down: our CEO Nancy Dubuc embarked on a global Listening Tour with CPO Daisy Auger-Domínguez last year, to hear employee feedback or concerns, an exercise which was foundational for informing how we built our latest DEI strategy.

As part of our ongoing commitment to accountability and transparency, we publicly release an annual global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Report, along with a Pay Equity Study. The 2020 results show VMG is a majority female company (56%) and in the US, where ethnicity data can be collected in full, 42% of our employees are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color). We have doubled BIPOC representation at an executive level (2019: 20%, 2020: 43%) and published intersectional data for the first time, to allow for the most informative and constructive use of this information.

In this world where culture moves fast and brands have become increasingly easy to ignore – we help build brands from the inside of culture to make them relevant, to make them matter.

Rather than building marketing in traditional ways and then trying to insert it into culture via interruption, the best brands are making culture from the inside. This acts magnetically, drawing attention to itself.

We call this insider marketing, and it’s how we do things at Virtue.
We use cultural understanding to shape brands and make them more relevant, visible and valued.
We build brands that shape culture, that are embedded and contributing to it.

This gives you the strategic and creative expertise of a creative agency, with direct access to the means to shape and create culture. Operating from inside VMG, acting as a portal to all of those varied capabilities, all of that knowledge, all of that talent.