I'm starting to worry about the future of our industry, are you? It's hard to ignore the lack of diversity. What's your take on why we're still seeing this pattern of most white male CDs, especially when we know our audiences are craving more authentic storytelling?

Is being a white male the opposite of “authentic storytelling?”

I think there’s DEFINITELY too much of one distintively bro-y sense of humor in advertising, and we should seek diversity in both background and sensibility.

But c’mon, making one type of person the enemy is not a solve either. The answer is “because those are the majority of candidates who got into advertising” but the solve isn’t to make sure they never lead. It’s to feed the talent pool with more diversity and have them train the next, more diverse generation to have the same confidence and experience. One of the tricky things with DEI is that we hire a lot of people who aren’t perfect fits for a role to fill a quota and when layoffs hit, they all get cut first. That’s unfair to everyone.

We need more diversity for sure but you cannot tell me that we need that Velveeta martini to feel more “authentic.”

Uhh, which industry? This article is about fashion.

I work on a team of mostly women, clients are mostly women, I’ve had women CDs at every agency I’ve worked at. This is such a tired take

Ugh. 2020 called and wants its take back.

White Americans make up 71% of the US population, about half of them are men. You’re going to see a lot of white men everywhere.

Audiences don’t really care who the Creative Directors are.

But I think the bigger thing is that clients don’t really want diverse viewpoints or ideas. They just want cookie cutter storytelling that’s backed up with green testing numbers. If anything, they want the air of authenticity, not actual authenticity.

Even if advertising is more diverse now at the agencies (current agency is less than half white), the C suites are incredibly white. Gatekeeping and politics ignore all the DEI championing at the top level.

The amount of anti-diversity threads on Fishbowl prove this is not just a "Trump" thing. We see how y'all really feel. Message received.

As one of the minscule few black ECDs in this biz, I'm here to tell you not to worry, you the caucasian majority will be just fine for decades to come. Your cultural stranglehold in this biz is pretty secure.

Awesome news!! I'll be packing it in within a few years and you'll have even less BIPOC Creatives to worry about! 👍🏾

White people can’t tell authentic stories to people of other ethnicities? You need to be careful what nonsense you believe because you’re accidentally making a very strong case to have more white people in advertising. The majority of the country is white people… better not hire any BIPOC people because they can’t tell authentic stories to the majority of the population.

White men hire their friends who are white men. It’s an endless cycle.

I wanted to weigh in on this but position myself first. I’m a middle aged, CIS, white male. There, I said it. But, I’ve been a creative director and hiring manager for decades Who constantly tried to diversify his team. I looked for talent, skills, experience, in that order. I rarely cared about education, having hired creatives with just a high school diploma and turned away MBAs applying for senior strategy positions straight out of college.
My first hire was a recommendation rather than a hire since I’d just been hired after my internship at Fidelity Investments. It was a classmate from art school and a black male. I’ve hired men and women, people who have disabilities, Asian, Hispanic, Black, European and other, straight, queer, bi, etc. As a creative director I knew that our audience wasn’t all white heterosexual men, so we needed to have diverse creative voices to reach diverse audiences.
The problem was the lack of candidates.
That started in college. In Graphic Design I and in Typography I, both my female and male teachers expressed surprise that there were so many “boys” in the class. Us “boys” (most were 18-21, I was 26) were about half the class. We were white, black, brown and yellow. All of the women were white. All of the females in the class were natural born white women who grew up on the East Coast. Is “boys” came from Vietnam, Jordan, Iran, Chicago, both West and East Coast US. While the females in the class were fairly homogenized, at least us “boys” were diversified.
Later, as I returned for talks I saw more diversity among women, but less among men.
When I began working and hiring, this trend did not continue. In 6 years at one agency I had a single Asians and single black male candidate for the creative team. I hired one and was shot down by nepotism with the other and ended up with an almost entirely white team despite my efforts. I reached out to schools asking for candidates and made sure HR handed me ALL the resumes. I never found that HR was well versed in any job but their own that would qualify them to make decisions about hires. They wouldn’t know hierarchy of information or kerning if they sued them for sexual harassment. I made a special effort to reach out to young candidates on LinkedIn, introduce myself to people I met at conferences and Tweetups and reached out to state and community colleges with more diverse student bodies with little success. Maybe it was our Boston location, I simply did not find diverse candidates, regardless of skill level.
As a job seeker I found the same thing; marketing and advertising was almost entirely dominated by white women. In fact, I was flat out told I was passed over for a position I interviewed for because they didn’t like the optics of an older white male managing younger women. But in-house or agency I rarely saw anyone of color on creative teams. And I haven't seen diverse creatives in classes I’ve since taught or lectured. Where are they?

At Energy BBDO, all ECDs are white.

There’s been a ton of white women being hired and promoted. A lot of the big network agencies now have white women CEOs and CCOs, statistically still small compared to white men but definitely improved over any other group.

The industry has been slow to change, which is frustrating. One reason for this might be the existing networks that tend to favor similar backgrounds. I’m hopeful about the younger creatives, though, since the ones I know are focused on inclusivity and storytelling.

Representation matters. If people don’t see it, they don’t know they can be it. There is a lack of diverse talent in the industry for the younger generation to look up to and model which leads to a lack of new diverse talent coming in. It’s a hard cycle to break but I believe we’ve made positive strides in the right direction.

am i worrying no.
" It's hard to ignore the lack of diversity."
its hard to concentrate on this so called "diversity" when you dont have a full time position.

you better focus on retaining your position not anything else.

Starting?

Only starting to?