Advertising Industry Struggling to Diversify

lrittenhouse@businessinsider.com (Lindsay Rittenhouse)

After the March 16 Atlanta-area spa shootings left eight people dead, six of whom were women of Asian descent, Sai He, an Asian American copywriter, recalled his own experience with racism at an ad agency.

He tweeted that at his first job out of college, in 2016, an executive made racist comments to him, asking whether he eats dogs and whether an Asian person in a video was his cousin and using racial slurs like “ching chong.”

He laughed off the comments at the time, unsure of what else to do.

His experience spotlights a longstanding lack of racial diversity in the advertising world, which last year’s protests against killings by police brought new attention to.

The industry, which influences global purchasing decisions and is vital for companies trying to reach diverse audiences, remains white and male dominated. In 2019, executives at the major agencies WPP, Publicis, Dentsu, Omnicom, and IPG were between 82% and 85% white, according to a 2020 ANA report, which also found only 3% of 870 chief marketing officers were Black, 5% were Asian, and 4% were Hispanic.

Walter Geer, an executive creative director at the WPP agency VMLY&R and a rare Black agency creative leader, mentors Black ad professionals. A frequent comment he hears from them is, “I can’t believe I’m talking to someone who looks like me because I’ve never seen a Black executive creative director.”

Zeldrick Martin, a Black media and programmatic exec, said as one of the few Black employees at his workplaces, he’s been assigned to projects targeting African American consumers because leaders assumed “that’s what I would want to do.”

Advertisers have made pledges to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion and increase representation of people of color, particularly in the C-suite. But some ad professionals said they were disheartened that it seems to take national tragedies to drive change and expressed skepticism that companies will make good on their promises since they’ve heard similar pledges before without much improvement.