Advancing Diversity: Agency Heroes and Zeroes

For fifty years advertising39s race problem has been a poorly kept secret regularly exposed by the Urban League NAACP and New York City Commission on Human Rights as far back as 1963 and as recently as 2009 And yet when researching the subject for my dissertation at three large agencies in New York City I was repeatedly warned against requesting diversity data One HR manager wasn39t even allowed to see her own numbers Instead agencies doubled down on diversity scholarships award shows and other highvisibility PR efforts while carefully concealing their actual metricsBut last summer a coalition of Black advertising talent changed the calculus Amidst a flood of black squares performative allyship and solemn boilerplate pronouncements promising to quotdo betterquot and quothold ourselves accountablequot 600 ampamp Rising shifted the focus from expressed intent to measurable outcomes by launching CommitToChange an open brief challenging agencies to annually release their workforce diversity data quotacross gender and raceethnicity at all seniority levels in all departmentsquot so progress could be publicly tracked by activist consumers and conscientious clients alike When over thirty advertising agencies came forward I wondered if demographic transparency could finally be emerging as a new industry normSo in light of 600 ampamp Rising39s one year anniversary I decided it was time for an external audit to see who actually listened to their Black talent I sorted the list of signatories for 600 ampamp Rising39s Call for Change and found 13 agencies with at least 10 employees endorsing the open letter Anomaly BBDO Deutsch now Deutsch LA and Deutsch NY Droga5 Huge McCann NY RGA TBWAChiatDay The Martin Agency VaynerMedia VMLYampampR Wavemaker and Wieden Kennedy I then sent the 13 agencies queries about the transparency of their agencylevel workforce diversity data All responded and I39ve sorted them into two categories below heroes and zerosHeroes RGA Deutsch LA Deutsch NY Huge WK The Martin Agency and AnomalyWhile all seven of these agencies joined the CommitToChange campaign last year by publicly disclosing their diversity data RGA Deutsch and Huge jumped to the head of the class RGA posted their data to their MakeChange blog admitted systemic failure and requested quotadditional forces of accountability beyond our own structuresquot along with quota standardized database of information so the industry39s progress can be tracked over timequot Global CEO Sean Lyons even recorded a podcast on quotEmbracing Data TransparencyquotDeutsch LA was quite specific in laying out measurable commitments like quottripling the number of Black directors hired for commercial productionsquot and increasing Black leadership to 13 by 2023 Deutsch NY also made the quotIn for 13quot pledge and according to their most recent quarterly report have already hit that target Huge pledged on their website to quotincrease the share of both Women and BIPOC by 25 at the Executive levels within two yearsquotWK promised to quotshare our successes and failures publiclyquot and has done so before in 2009 Dan Wieden used a 4A39s speech to go off script cite statistics on minority underrepresentation in advertising and blame himself and other white leaders The Martin Agency recently updated their numbers and plans to eventually break down the data by department to help reveal glass walls Anomaly will update their data every yearZeroes VaynerMedia Droga5 McCann NY VMLYampampR Wavemaker BBDO and TBWAWhile heroes get diversity data transparency done zeros use creative accounting to stall and cover their tracks VaynerMedia told me that they will publicly report in September since it39s quota natural cycle for usquot but wouldn39t explain why they didn39t start last year Last Fall Droga539s Tiffany Edwards told Adweek that she expected to publicly release their numbers by the end of 2020 but it still hasn39t happened Their PR team assures me that they39re quotactively workingquot on it itamp8230eight months laterMcCann NY only posted their aggregated Worldgroup numbers last week after I inquired But true transparency and accountability happens at the agency level Lumping McCann MRM McCann Health Momentum Craft UM Weber Shandwick and FutureBrand together only muddies the water Besides these are not small agencies most of their employee totals number well into the thousands while dozens of smaller independent agencies like Wondersauce were somehow able to get their acts together and CommitToChange last yearAs for VMLYampampR Wavemaker BBDO and TBWA they39re all being held back by their holding companies WPP and Omnicom respectively are keeping all their agency reporting internal The only public release is at the holding company level which similar to McCann39s approach aggregates all the data together thereby making it worthless as an external agency accountability tool If these diversity numbers are going to matter then they39ll need to be specific enough for clients to compare when entertaining pitchesBut never fear Thanks to a brand new Agency DEI Accountability Tracker zeros can become heroes by filling out the data form But given their historic record of resistance and the restrictions of their holding companies most won39t do it on their own So clients It39s your move Change history by joining RGA and endorsing the platform as an industry wide diversity data standard requiring your agencies to use it and factoring in the comparative results when awarding new business This is how change happens And if not now whenClick the social buttons to share this story with colleagues and friendsThe opinions expressed here are the author39s views and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNetamp160

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Advancing Diversity: Agency Heroes and Zeroes

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Christopher Boulton

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