A MultiCultClassics visitor pointed to a MediaPost story spotlighting research from COMvergence that shows how White advertising agencies have appointed 195 new leaders over the past 16-18 months. The report appears to provide categorized breakdowns indicating the promotion of White women, but ignores racial and ethnic minorities. While White holding companies like Omnicom have steadfastly refused to publicize EEO-1 data, Omnicom President-CEO and Diverted Diversity Pioneer John Wren vowed to double the number of female creative leaders at BBDO in one year. In other words, Wren won’t share figures for racial and ethnic hiring, but he’ll put an exact quota on gender boosting—and the COMvergence report signals the female totals are being actively and openly revealed. Chip in HP CMO Antonio Lucio’s promise to expose his White advertising agencies’ success in accelerating the White women’s bandwagon, and it’s clear that gender diversity has leapfrogged true diversity. What’s more, advocating for White women has become the smokescreen du jour, deflecting attention from the exclusivity that has forever tainted the industry.
Report: U.S. Creative Agencies Appointed 195 To Leadership Roles In Last 16 Months
By Steve McClellan
New research from agency research firm COMVergence has found that over the last 18 months, major creative agencies in the U.S. have appointed 195 new leaders, of which 130 were recruited from the outside and 65 were promoted from within.
By gender, 120 of the newly appointed leaders were men and 75 were women.
The research defines leaders as among 10 key titles comprising the typical agency leadership team. However, similar titles are assigned the same title code (i.e., President, Chairman, Founder, Partner, Managing Director and General Director are assigned to CEO.)
Most of the appointed executive creative directors and chief creative officers were men.
However, nearly half of the 45 reported CEO/MD/Chairman appointments were women.
The report found that among the top 25 U.S. creative agencies FCB, Deutsch and Grey were the most aggressive leadership team recruiters during the 18-month period covered by the research (January 2016 to June 2017). Combined, those agencies accounted for 25% of the recruited leaders.
FCB, DDB and Droga5 were found to be the top women leadership team recruiters, while Havas and Leo Burnett were the top promoters of women to leadership positions.
I feel like I missed the memo where the advertising world decided to redefine "diversity" as "but only diversity for white women."
ReplyDeleteOr "only diversity for international hires, but not ever for American minorities".
http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/one-year-after-calling-on-agency-partners-to-be-more-diverse-verizon-cmo-shares-the-results/
"At the agencies, 31 percent of employees at the leadership level are people of color, up nine percent from last year. Eleven percent of those in leadership positions are hispanic, up 5 percent; 51 percent are female, up 3 percent."
The devil is in the details. My personal POV and experience is that the agencies hired tons of white Brazilians and other foreign creatives over the last year and that made the number of Hispanic and POC seem to spike. Then of that "51 percent are female," it's 99% of them are white females.
That's not diversity. That's agencies rigging the numbers and hoping nobody digs too deep.
WHERE ARE THE SPECIFIC NUMBERS, NOT PERCENTAGES, OF BLACK MEN AND WOMEN HIRED IN HIGHER LEVEL POSITIONS?
WHERE IS THE NUMBER OF US LATINXS, NOT FOREIGNERS ON VISAS?
WHERE IS THE NUMBER OF ASIAN AMERICAN (EMPHASIS ON AMERICAN) HIRES NOT IN ACCOUNTING BUT IN CREATIVE ROLES?
Why does nobody at Adweek or Ad Age or the Wall Street Journal have the balls to ever ask?