(MultiCultClassics credits ESPN’s C’MON MAN! for sparking this semi-regular blog series.)
The Advertising Age story about HP Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Antonio Lucio mandating diverted diversity for his White advertising agencies featured the following excerpt:
BBDO Worldwide President and CEO Andrew Robertson expressed his commitment to the idea saying, “the pursuit of gender equality is something Antonio and I have discussed a lot over the years, and not just because of business. I have two daughters and he has five. He knows about BBDO’s commitment to double the number of female senior creative leaders we have in one year and obviously supports it. His initiative to formalize an action plan on his business is something we welcome.”
Sorry, but Robertson is a culturally clueless liar and fucking moron.
First of all, Robertson is supposed to be focused on true diversity versus promoting White women, as his agency and Omnicom promised to address the chronic exclusivity 10 years ago. To date, BBDO’s greatest accomplishments in the area involve smokescreens like a Diversity Development Advisory Committee, a comic book and sending Chief Creative Officer David Lubars to Here Are All The Black People events. The actual results of these half-assed efforts are unknown, as Omnicom refuses to share its EEO-1 data. For Robertson to position himself and BBDO as genuinely concerned and committed to progress demonstrates dishonesty, hypocrisy and idiocy of the highest order.
C’MON WHITE MAN!
This HP thing pissed me off so much (focusing on gender first) that I went back and tallied the closest thing to an EEO-1 report the ad industry has. The top500under500.com list that someone put together as a joke? It’s still a relatively broad sample that gives us a hint of the industry at large.
ReplyDeleteThey randomly grabbed 500 interrelated people and fairly well known US ad agencies using LinkedIn. Give or take a few joke inserts (“Roger Sterling”, etc.) and a couple of creative teams, the breakdown (spotting for obviously Black faces, may have missed a couple) is pretty much:
35% female
65% male
2% black men
0.6% black women
So tell us again, HP, how the biggest opportunity is white women, please. We’d love to know the reasoning.