Mad Men may be set in the 1960s, but not much has changed since then. 92 percent of Super Bowl ads, Madison Avenue’s biggest showcase, were created by white men. No wonder that they represent such a limited worldview.
AdAge reports (rather defensively, it should be noted) on a report by the Madison Avenue project, made up of the NAACP counsel and a civil rights lawyer, and executed by a business professor at the University of Central Florida. The stats:
For the 58 spots in which the study was able to identify the creative team, 92% of the creative directors were white males, 7% were white females and one lone creative director was Latino. The Latino was not an agency employee, but the winner of Doritos’ consumer contest. There were actually 67 total spots, though TIDES was not able to find the race and gender of every creative director.
The head of the ad industry’s trade group happens to be a woman. And she had some not-very-helpful things to say:
This attention, paired with a lack of dialogue with agency leadership, could hinder real change, said American Association of Advertising Agencies CEO Nancy Hill.
“I think it makes it difficult, especially if agencies aren’t invited to have a discussion,” Ms. Hill, the only agency representative at the press conference today, said of the project’s press-first strategy. “It makes it feel like [the Madison Avenue Project] doesn’t want to have a conversation.”
Something tells me this is not a discussion agencies are particularly interested in having without being goaded into it by press-shaming.