Free The Bid is a diverted diversity directorial dumpster designed to promote female directors in the advertising industry. A handful of White advertising agencies have pledged to include a female director in all triple bids for commercial projects. Let’s hope the pledge to women is more honest than the routinely broken promises made to true minorities. While it’s a noble initiative, Free The Bid certainly mirrors the diverted diversity drives happening in adland. That is, women have leapfrogged to the front of the discrimination line, while the majority of minority directors will continue to get pooped on, pigeon-holed and paid in crumbs, receiving opportunities confined to commercials of color that ultimately air with limited media budgets. There will be no free-bid rides for the true minorities in the directorial field.
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Looking at the list of female directors that this initiative is supporting, I'm struck by how many of them are white females, and/or foreign white females, or just foreign female directors.
This is not set up to help minority directors in America.
It's set up to help the founder (a foreign white female) crack the US market and get more work for herself, and maybe a few crumbs for her foreign white female director friends, and leapfrog over minority directors of color in the US.
Then, as I look beyond the directors at the list of who represents them, all I see is a wall of production companies owned by white men, or white women.
No wonder ad agencies are lining up beyond this initiative. They don't have to change how they do business, or who they do business with, they just get to SAY they are diverse by giving a helping hand up to white females as they step up and over the backs of people of color.
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