Advertising
Age published a long and laborious report titled,
“Why Ad Industry Activism Isn’t Working.” The piece opined that diversity
initiatives have been ineffective because minorities are not unified in their
efforts—with Nathan
Young and Tiffany
R. Warren presented as symbolizing
the alleged contrasting and conflicting positions. This is a stereotypical perspective
rooted in ignorance and bullshit. After all, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
Malcolm X had differing styles, yet each managed to ignite progress. No, the
dearth of diversity in Adland is not the result of opposing Black
viewpoints—rather, it comes from the successful unity of White men and White
women perpetuating exclusivity and fostering systemic racism. Give credit where
credit is due.
Why Ad Industry Activism Isn’t
Working
Well-meaning attempts by TimesUp
Advertising and 600 & Rising were hampered by competing interests,
infighting and resistance to change
By Lindsay Rittenhouse
“There’s a lot of urgency in this
moment,” said Nathan Young in announcing the formation of 600 & Rising, the
nonprofit dedicated to dismantling systemic racism in the industry. “This is
something we’ve observed in past situations, where a group has raised an issue
about inequality in the ad industry, there’s a brief news cycle, agencies
weather through the storm and it ends up being swept up under the rug. We’re
forming to ensure that doesn’t happen.”
In the three months since, Young has
stepped down as president and the group said it was dissolving its structure
and will rebuild after a 30-day assessment period that ends September 7. People
close to the matter point to missteps along the way, such as Young breaking
ranks with existing diversity initiatives by tweeting a criticism of Adcolor,
sparking backlash. They also say that the movement’s leaders, Young and
co-founder Bennett D. Bennett became figureheads, which they argue the industry
does not need anymore.
In a recent interview with Ad Age,
Young says he also stepped down from his role as group strategy director of
Minneapolis agency Periscope out of concern for his and his family’s welfare.
“I had to step down from everything and I’m honestly not sure I’m going to come
back to advertising,” he says.
But Young was certainly right about
one thing: this is an all-too familiar story. The current situation surrounding
600 & Rising brings to mind another industry initiative, Times Up
Advertising, which was founded to fight sexual harassment and discrimination in
the industry. Like 600 & Rising’s rapid rise amid the racial injustice
movement fueled by Black Lives Matter, Times Up Advertising was also formed in
a reckoning period, the MeToo movement, with a few select members leading the
charge. Like 600 & Rising, Time’s Up Advertising’s original leaders were
thrust quickly into the spotlight, experienced a public stumble, and then
stepped back.
Times Up, of course, is still
operating, and the hope is that 600 & Rising will recover. But their mutual
experience indicates there is a larger, industry-wide issue at work. Consider
the commonalities: People interviewed for this story said that both groups’
original founders underestimated the complicated process for building these
types of organizations. They say groups like these are rarely equipped to
tackle the systemic issues they set out to fight, because they structure
themselves in the same red-tape heavy model that perpetuated the system,
dependent on layers of consensus and approval. And some say both causes got
caught in a tug-of-war between the industry’s old and new guard, stymying
progress.
In short, the ad industry can’t seem
to get out of its own way.
The irony, says one diversity and inclusion
chief within a holding company agency, is that the goal of both organizations
was to make the ad industry a more inclusive place, but they were actually not
inclusive of all points of view.
“This is where I believe both of
these initiatives went sideways: An emotional group of people, and emotional
for all the right reasons, thought they could build a better mousetrap,” says a
D&I exec, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Well-meaning people
were looking at their set of experiences and they were making judgment calls
about what it would take to prevent X and Y from happening and what it would
take to change a situation.” The problem, the executive says: “These leaders
were limited to their set of experiences.”
Powerful white women
Time’s Up Advertising found itself
in hot water not long after its March 2018 founding. When the organization held
its first open community meetings across 14 cities, many advertising
professionals who were not current agency employees were turned away, such as
freelancers. Some of the excluded women were those forced from the industry due
to the pervasive sexual harassment that the organization was founded to fight.
There were also criticisms lodged against the organization for not being
inclusive enough of women of color. Omnicom Director of Diversity Christena
Pyle later assumed the helm of Time’s Up Advertising but stepped down last week
to become chief equity officer of the Americas at Dentsu Aegis Network. Her
successor has not yet been named. She declined to be interviewed for this
story.
But, in its early days, Time’s Up
Advertising’s most public-facing executives were white women, including Wieden
+ Kennedy Global Chief Creative Officer Colleen DeCourcy and former DDB
Worldwide CEO Wendy Clark, who was recently named global CEO of Dentsu Aegis
Network.
The most damaging blow to Time’s Up
Advertising came when Clark, while leading DDB, hired former Droga5 Chief
Creative Officer Ted Royer to assist on a creative pitch for Volkswagen. Royer,
one of several men accused of misconduct by the anonymous Diet Madison Avenue
Instagram account, left Droga5 under an internal investigation, but the nature
of the probe was never disclosed.
After hiring Royer, Clark was forced
to step down from Time’s Up Advertising, saying, “Regrettably, I fell into a
traditional paradigm of business first and given the choice again I would do
things differently. That was a mistake. The reckoning for past behavior is not
just for survivors of sexual harassment, but for the whole industry, which
needs systemic change.”
DeCourcy, who declined comment for
this story, has also since stepped back from the spotlight.
The D&I executive says Time’s Up
Advertising in its original form was led by “powerful white women” who decided
“how we’re going” to fight sexual harassment and discrimination in the
industry. And just as the Suffrage Movement of the 19th and 20th centuries left
out Black women, the exec says many women of color who felt slighted by the
Time’s Up Advertising movement were left asking: “What about us?”
She also criticized the “action
plan” Time’s Up Advertising put forth in its early days, which asked women in
senior leadership positions to pledge to “foster a workplace where people are
challenged but still respected”; uphold that sexual harassment is “never” OK;
and to challenge “old power dynamics.”
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, we got the
most powerful women in the industry and that’s what they came up with? An HR
program?’” says the D&I exec.
Another holding company-owned agency
executive who requested anonymity notes that in moments of public reckoning,
agencies and clients are desperate “to want to act fast to make up for the lack
of time” but they “haven’t done the basics, the culture isn’t in place and you
want your intention, in some cases so obviously [influenced] by HR and PR, to
get you credit that you haven’t earned from an audience who does not know or
trust you.”
Too many voices?
With 180 initial signatories, Times
Up Advertising had many voices and many agendas to be heard. 600 & Rising,
so named after its signatories, had more than triple that number at its
original founding. Add to this the fact that most agencies already have
established internal programs in place to address discrimination against people
of color with well-paid D&I chief roles, longstanding industry-wide
initiatives like Adcolor, and the 40-year-old 4A’s Multicultural Advertising
Internship Program.
Bennett and Young seem to have
inadvertently stepped on some well-shod toes when they penned their open letter
to U.S. agencies outlining 12 actions necessary to achieve equity for people of
color. The original letter quickly ballooned to 1,100 signatories as U.S.
agencies and holding companies committed to the 12 actions, the first of which
entailed releasing their staff diversity data.
The rapid positive response—as well
as the significant amount of ink industry trade publications including Ad Age
gave to the nonprofit and founders—gave the organization considerable clout. As
the group’s notoriety grew, so did pressure to join. That didn’t sit well with
some executives, part of an older guard who had dedicated their entire careers
to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the industry, who felt the 600
& Rising’s solutions were simplistic and bordering on insulting.
“Releasing numbers doesn’t change
anything,” says another D&I executive, whose agency nonetheless signed on
to 600 & Rising. “It just makes a problem more well-known.” He cites its
No. 4 call to action, asking shops to pledge to bias training for HR employees
and management, as an example. “Pledge training? We’ve had training for
decades,” the exec scoffs.
Despite their reservations, these
D&I execs say they were ordered to sign on by agency leaders in a show of
good faith.
Bennett declines comment for this
story, citing the reassessment period the group is now undergoing. “We only
existed as an organization for a little more than 60 days,” Young says. “Our
first 60 days were about representing the people. Not the elites or the old
guard, per se.”
He says 600 & Rising “had every
intention” of working with the more established DE&I executives as the
organization progressed, and notes that some of them were appointed to the
advisory council and board.
Breaking ranks
On July 29, Young tweeted: “@ADCOLOR
is an awards ceremony completely divorced from reality that sells the story
that progress is being made on diversity in advertising and buys cover for
holding companies.”
To some, Young’s tweet felt like a
slap. “Why should the people in power, who are white people, care about us if
we use our power and stage to tear each other down?” the first D&I exec
says. “Especially if there is a person of color in a position of power, the job
should be to support that person, not use a public platform to disparage who
that person is.”
The reference was to Adcolor founder
and president Tiffany Warren, who also serves as senior VP and chief diversity
officer of Omnicom Group. Warren declines to discuss with Ad Age the situation
with 600 & Rising, but stresses that Adcolor was not specifically designed
as a group to promote diversity in the industry. Instead its purpose is to
bring visibility to marginalized creatives who were not getting the recognition
they deserved from industry awards like The Clios and Cannes Lions.
“We didn’t set out to say ‘I’m going
to fix the diversity, equity and inclusion problem in the industry,’” Warren
says. “We say very clearly that we honor people in their achievements to create
a blueprint for others to follow. ... People have to recognize that there are
different forms to get to the racial equity finish line. There is no one way.”
She adds, “It’s not conducive to not
be collaborative on that front.”
Some believe that it wasn’t so much
Young’s comment, but the way it was made that was to blame. “Why do we do this
to ourselves? It’s so messy. While I do agree organizations like Adcolor could
be better for a number of reasons, for example cliqueyness [sic], overall
they’re working for change,” one senior VP wrote on the anonymous industry app
Fishbowl. “I feel like that’s an opinion that should’ve been voiced in the
community/amongst friends. We need to be a united front if we want change.”
Young acknowledges this criticism
and, in hindsight, agrees. He says he “regrets” the public comments he made
about Adcolor. “Systemic racism is an enormous problem,” he says. “It does
really require us all to work together. Organizations can disagree on tactics,
but we shouldn’t resort to public criticisms. There needs to be more
collaboration and less competition.”
Getting its sea legs
Kai D. Wright—founder and curator of
blacklist100, global consulting partner for Ogilvy and Columbia University
lecturer—believes 600 & Rising’s biggest problem is that it was too tied to
its leaders. He says “there are many successful models for change that are not
the traditional hierarchy of top-down with one leader, which helps prevent any
single leader's missteps from distracting from the mission, message and
movement of the broader community of supporters.”
Wright points to Black Lives Matter
as one such grassroots initiative. “The more voices and the bigger the
coalition, the better,” he says, noting that he hopes to see that from 600
& Rising when it reemerges. “It’s incredibly important to give [600 &
Rising] time to get their sea legs,” he says.
“You can’t fight against traditional
structures by setting up the same structures,” mired in legal and
administrative “bullshit.”
Kai Deveraux Lawson, global director
of community engagement and global culture at WPP
Young notes that he was
unintentionally thrust into the spotlight to be the voice for “thousands” of
Black industry professionals and that this was not something he “was prepared
to do.” He says it was never his or Bennett’s intention to become so prominent
in the organization. “That was an unintended consequence,” he says, of having
tough conversations “in the open and not behind closed doors.”
Fighting ‘traditional structures’
There’s also a theory that both
Time’s Up Advertising and 600 & Rising became too, well, organized.
Kai Deveraux Lawson, global director
of community engagement and global culture at WPP, declines to comment
specifically on either group, but says, generally, that the challenge with marketing
and advertising executives starting community initiatives is that they try to
build it in the way they know how: like a company. “You can’t fight against
traditional structures by setting up the same structures,” which she says get
mired in legal and administrative “bullshit.”
“When you get into larger
organizations, you have stakeholders, shareholders, members,” Deveraux Lawson
says. “Now you have 1,000 people you have to legally listen to. If your
activism is in the name of gender advocacy, have you spoken to all the women?
Or were you busy formulating contracts? If it’s racial injustice, have you
spoken to all the people who experienced racism or were you busy filing
documentation so you’re fine for the next tax season?”
One D&I exec who signed the 600
& Rising’s “Call to Action” letter argues that there’s been too much
pressure on industry organizations to effect the change, when instead the onus
should be on the executives within the companies that continue to uphold
discriminatory structures.
“We have been demanding change for
decades, internally and externally,” the exec says. “Adcolor cannot change an
industry, neither can 600 & Rising, nor can Time’s Up. They can shed light
on [issues], but the change has to start with the people who run these
companies.”
So why hasn’t it happened? Says this
exec: “They don’t truly want change.”
