Diversity Is A Survival Issue For Creative Industries, And Marketers, Too

How can businesses attract true creative talent when they only employ a select few? How can marketing departments target audiences they might not understand? The industry is crying out for diversity.

There’s a big difference between a working environment that has some diverse people in it and a working environment that actively celebrates diversity. Former Saatchi & Saatchi chairman Kevin Roberts showed how little he understood that difference when he declared this summer that the gender diversity debate in the advertising industry was “all over” and that diversity campaigners including consultant Cindy Gallop were “making up a lot of the stuff to create a profile, and to take applause, and to get on a soap[box].”

Although Roberts is long gone from Saatchi & Saatchi now, the evidence suggests that his comments are just the tip of a large iceberg that stubbornly refuses to melt. Equality and diversity are a huge issue—not just for adland but for marketers as well.

Why Is Equality Still An Issue?

Diversity in the creative industries is about far more than just gender equality, of course, but it’s a good place to start to see where the problem lies. In the U.K, women make up more than half of junior agency roles within the ad industry, but this drops to 30% for women in leadership positions, according to data from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). If we can’t empower and support women equally when the industry has so much potential talent within its ranks, what chance does it have in improving its performance on ethnic diversity (hugely under-represented, as Airbnb’s CMO Jonathan Mildenhall pointed out at Cannes this year)? Or on establishing LGBT role models in leadership positions?

Recent research from MOBO and the Creative Industries Foundation found that 17.8% of the creative workforce should be made up of people from black, Asian, and ethnic minority (BAME) backgrounds in order to reflect the population they’re marketing to—but that number now stands at just 11%. We have a long way to go on a lot of fronts.

Wanted—Executive Leaders To Change The Narrative

Forward-thinking businesses talk about diversity as a potential source of competitive advantage—but for the creative industries, it’s becoming more of a survival issue. How can you hope to compete for the next generation of creative talent, when you only seem to offer opportunity to a narrow slice of that generation?

The creative industry is eroding its talent brand in the areas where it needs to be the strongest. Here, at LinkedIn, we talk a lot about the positive role that executive thought-leadership can play for businesses by embodying the values that those businesses stand for—and demonstrating how they run all the way through from top to bottom.

Recent events have shown the potential dark side of this. They’ve demonstrated what goes wrong when your executive leaders don’t actually understand what the culture of your business is or needs to be. I know that there are leaders out there who do understand this and who are fully committed to diversity. The reaction to Roberts’ comments demonstrated some of the strength and extent of that feeling. It would be great to see more of those people taking an active role as executive thought leaders and forcing a change in the narrative at board level.

Diversity In Advertising Matters To Marketers

Marketing departments can’t afford to be complacent on diversity. Brands tend to be part of larger businesses with stronger governance and this can have a positive role in ensuring that diversity is taken seriously. It’s why there are stronger diversity role models in leadership positions on the client side than on the agency side. But the fact that marketing shares many of the same working pressures as advertising means there’s a risk that the same excuses can creep in if we’re not vigilant. A lack of diversity also means that the creative leaders both in agencies and in-house at brands are developing campaigns for audiences they might not necessarily understand.

Perhaps most importantly, senior marketers are in a pretty good position to do something about advertising’s diversity problems before it’s too late. On Twitter, Mildenhall made the point that, if he were CMO of P&G, he’d seriously question Saatchi & Saatchi’s understanding of the brand’s core consumer. Should marketers be responsible for asking more of these types of questions?

For the vast majority of people working in both marketing and advertising, foot-dragging on diversity is hugely frustrating. It’s time to change the conversation—but to do that, we need to keep actively talking about this issue until it’s solved, not just waiting for the next person to demonstrate that it isn’t.