A panel, comprising BMF’s Christina Aventi, Mediahub’s Linda Fagerlund, IAG’s Mark Echo and brand strategy consultant Eugene Healey have warned that Australian diversity in creativity is being hampered by the conservative and risk averse manner of Australian boards, who are often 50-60 year old “white dudes’.
This approach curtails leadership teams – even those that are more progressive – from hiring or promoting diverse talent, which in turn trickles down into lacklustre and safe creative output that doesn’t always represent and resonate with modern day Australia.
Smelly Lunch Stories, in partnership with Urban List, surveyed 366 professionals about the state of DE&I in the advertising industry. It found that 76 per cent had to downplay or hide their cultural identity to fit in, 34 per cent felt overlooked for opportunities and 75 per cent believe that unconscious bias is a barrier to career progression.
At a Smelly Lunch Stories panel in Sydney last week, BMF’s strategy chief Christina Aventi, called out being “beholden to boards and shareholders” as an issue holding back diversity of thinking in creativity and bold work, with some of the survey sentiments at play.
“There is an issue with boards and representation there, and you don’t understand the influence boards have on your business, and that is the case with boards and shareholders across our clients business as well,” she said. “We need to address it up the top to prevent it cascading down; the fact that (diversity in creative thinking) is classified as a ‘risk’ is shit.”
Aventi said that the problem is “deeply systemic” and difficult to fix, but caveats that not all areas in the creative industry are dominated by men. She points out that women are well represented when it comes to planners in leadership roles.
“But when it comes specifically to the CCOs, statistically speaking they are more likely to be a male,” she said.
Aventi and BMF Australia CEO Stephen McArdle try to overcome this issue by “hire wide, hire differently…to make sure that we’ve got representation of generations, ethnicities, genders and other areas”.
“You really have to overcompensate for that [unconscious bias] with your board, with your shareholders, when you’re beholden to them, because that’s where some of that rhetoric is coming from,” she added. “And you just hope that you’ve got a good enough relationship with them that they have faith in the decision that you’re making. And it’s not a compromise either.”
Mark Echo is the executive manager of channel, performance marketing and effectiveness at insurer IAG, which serves more than half of Australians through companies including NRMA, CGU, WFI and ROLLiN’.
He said that diversity in thinking and the communications is critical to his group, and “something we are conscious about every day”.
“Our superpower (as marketers) is finding a cultural nuance or a cultural insight, putting our finger on it and broadcasting it to the masses. Now when we’re talking about how we broadcast it, we can probably be better at that and conscious effort needs to go into that every single day,” he said.
Echo doesn’t believe that quotas are the best way to improve diversity at a board and leadership level because that would be akin to “putting a Band-Aid on a systemic problem”.
“Unless you’ve tried to break down that system you won’t fix the problem. And I don’t believe in them, because there will be productivity trade offs,” he added.
Smashing the echo chamber
Are all marketing teams and clients conscious of diverse representation and thinking in creativity?
Mediahub strategy lead Linda Fagerlund, one of the founders of Smelly Lunch Stories, is not so sure.
“The reason why it’s not changing is because we don’t have enough decision makers or influencers at senior marketing level like Mark Echo, for instance, who can recognise it is an issue and be willing enough to see that it’s not producing the best possible work that we that we can produce,” she said.
“How do we help elevate more diverse voices into those positions of leadership? Because it won’t change unless we’re in the room. Otherwise, it’s just an echo chamber.
“Unfortunately, the institutions that exist now are not created for those diverse voices and conversations. And that’s really the heart of this issue.”
Brand strategy consultant and TikTok creator Eugene Healey takes it a step further, describing Australian boards “as close to a theocracy as we’re going to get”.
“It’s a cabal of a very narrow set of older (average age of 50s and 60s), established voices that very, very rarely let people (different to them) into the tent,” he said.
“The problem starts at the top and everything flows down from there, all of the conservatism and risk aversion stuff.
“Australia more broadly, is a country of oligopolies, where everyone’s mostly concerned about not getting fired and not losing market share, rather than (embracing) opportunity.”
