How Advertising's Star Model Protects Abusers

Though Spark used a portion of his closing remarks to belatedly recognize the qualifications of his fellow guests by admitting that, despite working in advertising for many years, he "had no expertise on the topic" ...  and eventuated the podcast by initially sending Knorpp Scaman's article ... neither his lack of relevant experience nor apparent interest in allyship could stop him from attempting to shut down the conversation a mere five minutes in.

Bostic began by arguing that the advertising industry has long tolerated men who sexually and emotionally abuse women because so many agencies operate on "a star model" that hinges their profitability on their top execs' big reputations and loyal clients, which in turn makes them "too big to fire" no matter how badly they might behave. And when she recommended dismantling the system by cutting stars' salaries in half and doubling the salaries of junior executives, Spark dropped the hammer of condescension: "You can't offer unrealistic solutions. I mean seriously. You know that's unrealistic."

And what, you might ask, is Spark's more "realistic" (yet non-expert) solution? Executives announcing a zero-tolerance policy and HR taking complaints seriously.

Seriously?

Never mind that, as Gallop explained, every holding company already has such a policy and it hasn't stopped the abuse. Or that HR works to protect the company. Or that NDAs and settlements intimidate and bribe victims into silence. Or that whistleblowers are often blacklisted. Never mind all of that, because, even after each point was explained patiently and in meticulous detail to Spark, he nevertheless persisted. He also took pains to note that not all "rainmakers" are sexual harassers. Duly noted.

So, Spark didn't come to learn. Instead, he offered an all-too-accurate representation of the advertising industry: a man initiating a conversation about misogyny only to talk over two women more expert than him, patronize them both with lectures about how business "actually" works, refuse to be corrected, propose demonstratively failed solutions and, of course, defend himself. Nevertheless, I am grateful for Spark's honesty as it offered an unvarnished glimpse of how individual men can try to thwart women fighting for reform while also teeing up Bostic's compelling breakdown of the more systemic barriers they face. The rest of the words are hers.

I've been spending a lot of time talking to chief compliance officers and people who are responsible for setting up compliance programs at publicly traded companies. What they essentially do is they make a calculation: "What is the likelihood of enforcement? And what is the impact of penalty? How likely is it that the regulator is going to come after me? And, if they come after me, what is my risk? How much am I going to have to pay? Am I going to go out of business?"

If the likelihood that someone's going to come after you is low, then you kick the can down the road. If the impact of the penalty is really high, then you might start to say to yourself, "We should start a program to get into compliance in the next two to five years." If both of the things are high -- it's both urgent and important, as it were -- then they suddenly get on the stick and start spending money on getting into compliance. Reputational risk, as it turns out, works exactly the same way. If they don't think there's any reputational risk (investors won't care, the trade press won't care, there won't be a bad headline about them), then they kick it down the road.

And the problem with saying, "We're going to have a zero-tolerance policy and we're going to take these complaints seriously" is that that isn't actually how compliance programs work. It's not how HR functions. The job of the corporation is to protect itself because they're trying to protect their shareholder value. As long as that is the primary purpose of HR and all of these internal systems, then taking a complaint seriously backfires on the person complaining.

One of the first things that happens when you file a complaint for sexual harassment is the company moves to separate from you. And the reason they do that is so you are outside the tent. Once you are outside the tent, you have no protection from the company. And that's the point. You've complained about the company; you are not one of us anymore. The whole structure of "compliance" immediately runs against the person doing the complaining.

You have to have outside influence in much the same way that, as long as Harvey Weinstein is doing really well at the box office and winning Oscars, no one's coming after him. It takes New York Times reporters and Ronan Farrow going after him in order to start the conversation about how this man is a serial rapist. And that should be the proof that it's not good enough to say, "We take these inquiries seriously; we have a zero-tolerance policy," because these were actual crimes. A lot of what goes down in agencies doesn't rise to the level of physical assault, it's mere sexual harassment, which is not a crime. It's a civil tort. I can sue you about it, but you're not ever going to go to jail. So, the stakes, even when they're that high, [make] all the structural forces accrue to the benefit of the person who's the rainmaker. And that's why I want to dismantle the rainmakers.

I think people should be rewarded for performance, absolutely. But there is a kind of system in place that puts people who are famous, award-winning, respected by certain kinds of men (you know -- loved by a client, provocative, whatever) in a position of power and they get paid enormous sums of money to do it. While all of the people who are actually doing the work are being paid $30,000 a year. When you're making $30,000 a year as a junior account executive who has been sexually harassed by the head of the account, who's making a half a million dollars a year, you cannot possibly afford to complain because now you've got to go find another job and you've got to try to do that without bringing with you the reputational risk of having accused this famous well-respected man of something bad.

There are incentives in place that should really be looked at. Now, I think that's about as likely as HR suddenly becoming a defender of the working class, but that does not mean that the underlying structure does not need to be torn down and built anew.

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Farrah Bostic's Bio

Farrah Bostic has worked at Digitas, Ipsos/OTX, Hall & Partners, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, TBWA\Chiat\Day and Wieden + Kennedy. She has a bachelor's degree in journalism and communications from the University of Oregon, a juris doctor from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and runs The Difference Engine, a strategy and research consultancy she founded in 2011 to help clients like JetBlue and Google make big decisions.

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