Advertising’s Diversity Déjà Vu.

We’ve been here before, but agencies have amnesia and brands aren’t coming to the rescue; it’s time to sue.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

An abridged version of this article originally appeared in Adweek.

I began researching advertising’s diversity problem back in 2009. It was an auspicious year. In January, Cyrus Mehri, in partnership with the NAACP, formed the Madison Avenue Project and released a 73-page report documenting the industry’s systemic under-hiring, under-utilization, and under-payment of African Americans. 4A’s CEO, Nancy Hill pleaded no contest: “The numbers speak for themselves. It’s disappointing and discouraging. More has to be done.”

Then, in March, NAACP interim general counsel Angela Ciccolo sent the report’s findings in a letter imploring the 25 top spending brands (including Proctor & Gamble) to use their combined client value of $52 billion to pressure their agencies to diversify. In April, Dan Wieden addressed the 4A’s Leadership Conference with a surprise speech on how “fucked up” it is that so few Black kids work in advertising while W+K pays white kids so much money to sell Black culture. Finally, in August, Sanford Moore, exasperated by 40 years of broken promises, wrote that only economic divestiture would have enough leverage to dismantle advertising’s apartheid system.

Intrigued, I conducted focus groups, interviews, and fieldwork inside three large NYC agencies during the summer of 2010. I then spent the next six years analyzing the data, writing my doctoral dissertation, and publishing a book chapter and two articles in peer-reviewed journals. All along the way, I shared my writing with industry insiders working on diversity in the hopes that an outside perspective would help them make the case for why increasing diversity in advertising was both urgent and necessary. Four years went by. Crickets.

Madison Avenue “Awakes”

So, when George Floyd’s murder caused the 4A’s and P&G to turn “anti-racist,” the ANA against “systemic racism,” and myriad agencies into Black Lives Matter supporters, I took the parade of performative allyship with a grain of salt. “Where were you ten years ago?” I wondered. And, more importantly, ”What have you done since?” Thanks to 600 & Rising and shareholder activists, I would soon find out: not much.

Nonetheless, as though the Madison Avenue Project had never warned them, agencies pumped out PR campaigns of shock, dismay, and soul-searching commitments to “do better” and “hold ourselves accountable.” Sound familiar? Well, so were most of the proposed solutions: more anti-bias training, scholarships, diversity officers, and, yes, award shows. From across the sector came clarion calls for action, but the fix was already in.

The Industry Hits the Snooze Bar

Just nine days after 600 & Rising shook the table, called on agency leaders to “track and publicly report workforce diversity data on an annual basis to create accountability for the agency,” and launched a #CommitToChange campaign that got over 30 agencies, including W+K, to disclose their numbers, the 4A’s announced a partnership that would redirect and neutralize the group’s most potent threat: actual consequences for individual agencies. We’ll take it from here, they said, and promised to put out an “industry benchmark” survey that keeps all agency results confidential, aggregated, and therefore utterly worthless; how on earth does one hold an entire industry “accountable?”

And, sure enough, three months later, I attended the 4A’s Equity & Inclusion Congress for the roll out of a glossy new report of old news. Echoing her predecessor’s remarks from 2009, 4A’s CEO Marla Kaplowitz was contrite in 2020: “The data sucks. Right? We all know that and it has for a while.” Indeed. And then, having yet again named the villainy while protecting the villains, the 4A’s promoted their new Vanguard leadership fellows product (only $4,950 for members) with a revealing statistic: “In 1978, 5% of the advertising workforce was Black. Fast forward 40 years and only 6% are Black.” The only problem is that MAIP, the 4A’s flagship diversity program with the proud tagline “40 years of success,” has been running that whole time. Forty years. 1%. It is what it is.

Time’s Up

Advertising’s diversity industrial complex, whether it be the 4A’s, MAIP, ADCOLOR, WAATBP, or even newer initiatives like Allyship and Action, etc. are no doubt made up of earnest, well-meaning people who want to help advertising do the right thing. And their hard work is rewarded by grateful testimonials from Black talent who’ve blossomed under their support, mentorship, and career development.

But the plurality of anecdote is not data and these organizations are in denial if they think their laudable, positive, and qualitative efforts will ever be able to meet the overwhelming quantitative scale of a disease diagnosed by the New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR) as far back as 1967 and as recently as 2006. Advertising’s cancer of anti-black racism has metastasized; it’s time for radiation.

For Ibram X. Kendi, being anti-racist requires understanding history and a willingness to dismantle racists policies. As they say, “what gets measured, gets done” and the 4A’s policy of keeping agencies’ diversity numbers private not only protects their white-dominated member agencies from public embarrassment, it also enables incremental and largely symbolic results while undermining activist’s efforts to bring the kind of transparency and public accountability that truly systemic change requires.

So, as many industry leaders solemnly acknowledge “the long road ahead,” they forget where they’ve already been. The long road is behind us. For fifty years, advertising has demonstrated the chronic failure of internal inspiration, cajoling, or even tough sounding self-regulation. And don’t hold your breath for clients to use their leverage. It would take a boycott to make brands walk their talk.

Diversity’s New Diagnosis

In 2019, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and NYU professor Pamela Newkirk published “Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise Of A Billion-Dollar Business,” a landmark survey chronicling how workplace diversity initiatives have turned into a sprawling and profoundly misguided apparatus that perpetuates and enriches itself while doing precious little to bring equality to America’s major industries and institutions. In pointing out the yawning gap between the aspirational rhetoric of inclusivity and the more grounded metrics of actual outcomes, Newkirk found that most Chief Diversity Officers, despite their title and healthy salaries, consistently miss their goals because they are isolated from power and largely relegated to serving a public relations role for the company. Indeed, she cites how only 35% of Fortune 500 CDO’s even had access to their institution’s own diversity data and generally feel unsupported.

When asked in interviews to cite an example of a corporation that actually got it right, Dr. Newkirk points to Coca-Cola. In the early 2000’s, the company embarked on one of the most successful diversity transformations ever seen in corporate America. Coke granted broad monitoring powers to a seven-member external task force who made sure the company kept track of salary, promotion, and bonus metrics along race and gender lines and then took active steps to detect and disrupt patterns of bias in real time. With rigorous outside scrutiny and consistent intervention, Coke was able to significantly increase the numbers of Blacks in their workforce and insure equity in terms of how they were evaluated, promoted and compensated.

What inspired the Coca-Cola company to go down this path, you ask? A class action race discrimination lawsuit brought by Black employees. And who negotiated the record-breaking $192.5 million settlement? You already know his name and may be hearing from him again soon.