One more thing regarding the Verizon Responsible Marketing Action Plan warrants examination. Advertising Age reported that the communications company developed a “Diversity Inclusion & Equality Measure” to gauge race, ethnicity, gender and identity representation in its advertising.
Gee, it’s inadvertently appropriate that the tool’s acronym is DIE Measure.
Verizon Chief Marketing Officer Diego Scotti said, “It’s an important thing because when the creatives of the agencies start seeing that you are actually measuring the creative with those lenses it creates a virtual cycle. It’s not punitive what we do, but it’s like, ‘Guys, we have to do better.’”
Okay, but why doesn’t Verizon design a device to gauge race, ethnicity, gender and identity representation in its advertising agencies? It might create a virtual cycle for fairness and equality in hiring practices—and ultimately negate the need for heat shields like DIE Measure.
To express concern for representation in promotions while ignoring representation in partners represents privilege—and fuels a vicious cycle of racist hypocrisy.
Old White Guys, we have to do better.
3 comments:
Verizon is cheating when they list their diversity goals. Sorry/not sorry.
They're ignoring the elephant in the room (no real meaningful amount of dollars spent with racial minority agencies) by listing white women vendors they've already routinely worked with for at least 8 to 10 years, by claiming they've boosted their internal hiring numbers but never mentioning what percentage precisely of those workers were Black and folding all BIPOC and LGBTQ and white women into the mix, and by a dozen other dodges that never face up to what's really going on.
In 2021, Verizon and all the white owned ad agency parent companies they lavish with money (IPG, Publicis and WPP) banded together and created a BS "DEI Responsible Marketing Action Plan" and panel designed to keep the money in their pockets, no one else's pockets, definitely not any Black pockets.
This latest press release is the result of that "initiative," and it's why if you look close at what entities and divisions and hires they are counting as diversity successes, many of them lead back to companies and employers and bank accounts ultimately owned by IPG, Publicis and WPP.
The public statement from Verizon about their workforce data is for show. It's to create a public record of the appearance of diversity when there is none.
Behind the scenes they have been arguing with the state of California that they shouldn't be compelled to release actual workforce diversity data in public as mandated by state guidelines because it's just toooo hard and not faiiiir, and the government should totally trust them and their internal diversity reporting that no one can actually verify:
https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M398/K046/398046704.PDF
Nah, they're lying. Publicis quietly shifted ownership of a company in Miami this spring who called themselves independent and "minority owned" in public and in the trades, but all Publicis did was grab a big chunk of the company's ownership and therefore the profits for themselves.
It's certified as minority, yeah, but the actual majority profiteers of Verizon's diversity spending initiative is still its ultimate owners, Publicis.
Verizon isn't directing more money into minority companies, it's simply redirecting money that was already going into white holding company pockets, still into white holding company pockets.
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