The Year of Reckoning: A Refresher on the Marketing Industry’s Diversity Paradox in 2020

 

Before the novel coronavirus and a rash of police brutality brought structural racism back into stark focus, and before advertising giants were taken to task for this year’s slew of tone-deaf commercials, we knew the marketing industry had a diversity problem. In the wake of Hollywood’s movement for racial equity (remember #OscarsSoWhite?) marketers took a look around the office and really started to notice, well, how white it was. Being at the forefront of understanding what potential customers want, we began recommending that the brands we represent start appealing to a wider audience.

 

At first, we recommended that big brands look at new ways to engage with different audiences, including finding new and fresh voices, creative elements and various perspectives that directly appeal to a more nuanced target audience. Under the old guard of media and advertising, the norm was to create ads and campaigns targeted at a mass, primarily white population. It was still a relatively new idea to explore the things that African Americans, women and other cultures liked that deviated from the status quo and create specific campaigns for those audiences.

 

Major campaigns appealing to various age groups, women and minorities, and in some cases, even social movements, showed promising results. For example, following the #MeToo movement, Twitter, Google and Nike all jumped on board with various advertising campaigns designed to empower women. All of that sounds like a positive step in the right direction, and the ads were generally well-received, but something still wasn’t quite right. These big ad agencies were recommending their clients shift their communication to a more conclusive, diverse message, while they themselves remained (and still remain) almost entirely dominated by white males.

 

We’ve come to understand this problem as the “diversity paradox,” and though industry-wide numbers haven’t changed much in the past couple of years, we are starting to see individual companies and coalitions create plans that go beyond talking about our industry’s issues and take steps towards solving them. For example, Nike ousted several leadership-level employees to combat their reputation as a “boys’ club,” and it has made a huge impact on its business and its relationship with their ad agency. 

 

Even clients have noticed the diversity paradox, and they are demanding more. Back in 2016, The New York Times published an article claiming that big brands wanted ad agencies to diversify. In 2017, highlighted in an article published by AdWeek, an Adobe study aimed to understand the diversity issue and plunged into why agencies were having difficulty fulfilling this request. The reasons cited in the study are the standard boilerplate expressions of why women and minorities struggle to gain success in any industry, which, to our ears in 2020, sound like lip service from a group of happily successful and secluded white males.

 

At this point, marketing firms with a conscience recognize that it’s disingenuous to recommend our brands and clients be more diverse and inclusive while we continue to only offer that opinion from our singular perspective. And the problem goes all the way to the top: Diversity and Inclusion experts have made it clear that it’s very difficult to retain diverse hires in low-level positions without mirroring that inclusiveness in company leadership. No matter how hard you may try, or how much market research you do, it is impossible for an agency full of white males to create authentic work that appeals to the greater audience. Representation has to stretch all the way from our audience to the C-suite.

 

As I already mentioned, the numbers have still yet to improve. But as we marketers love to do, the industry has begun gathering data to set benchmarks and create realistic goals. Just this September, a benchmarking survey of 165 agencies representing more than 40,000 employees—found that Black and African American employees make up just 5.8% of the industry, while 8.68% identify as Hispanic or Latinx, 10.7% as Asian/Asian American, 4.23% as “other” and 70.51% as white or caucasian. Of the less than 6% who are Black or African American, 68% are admin or entry-level, 43.5% are non-management professionals, 27.6% are managers or directors and just 4% are vice presidents or higher, excluding C-suite roles. 

 

We found several examples of big agencies shaking up business-as-usual to make way for diversity and inclusion: According to Forbes, Ad agency Horizon Media created resources for different employee groups such as Black, African American, LGBTQ, Hispanic, Latinx and Asian employees, as well as working parents while also looking outside the ad industry for talent. GM has created a scorecard to measure progress in all outgoing creative from their agencies, and Havas is conducting extensive internal research. Ad Age and Facebook have formed a collective of advertising, marketing and media leaders focused on a different objective every year (2020’s theme has been amended to “confronting unconscious bias in the wake of the new normal). Legacy organization She Runs It has launched the #Inclusive100 movement, a drive for agencies to commit to specific initiatives and participate in an annual benchmarking report.

 

The male-ness of the marketing industry hit home for us at @revenue when we saw how skilled working mothers are being pushed out of our own industry. As marketing leaders in our community, we felt that it’s past time for us to follow suit with these industry giants and not just talk about our diversity problem, but take drastic action to fix it. This year, the data, the goals and the strategies are finally coming together in an actionable way. And we are ready to do something about it. It’s time to change the way we hire, promote, manage and appreciate our teams. We need to listen to stories and open our internal offices to inclusion. There is no other way to understand and be better than to start doing and try it, track it, change it. Let’s start a revolution.

An earlier version of this article was published on Forbes.