Bec Brideson will be launching her not-for-profit procurement initiative Women With Agency when she speaks at Badass Women during Cannes Lions 2019.

The Badass Women panels represent the world’s most badass female business leaders and creatives who will share their outlook, experiences as well as paint a picture of what a badass future for the industry looks like.

“I am beyond grateful and cannot thank the Cannes Lions team enough,” Bec Brideson said, “But as Madison Avenue descends on La Croisette yet again, I’m here to pose the question – where are all the women-owned creative empires?”

Brideson said she was excited to talk about her initiative Women With Agency which she believes will not only resolve the continuing lack of female founder representation, but enable more women to build creative empires through fairer public and corporate procurement opportunities. Bec is proud to have grown her businesses successfully but fought for many years with innumerable barriers including access to these exact opportunities. She has observed the same struggle for many other female-founded businesses both in Australia and globally, with many leaving the game or closing their doors.

“In the last two decades, female enterprise has risen 46 per cent but women are still kept out or forced from the game. This is bad for overall business. Studies have found that 34 per cent of companies who diversified their supplier base with women-owned businesses reported a positive impact on their profitability and that a gender equal labour market could add as much as $12T to global GDP,” she said.

Women-founded businesses receive only one per cent of global public procurement revenues and only one per cent of global corporate procurement dollars. Bec Brideson believes we should redress the diversity of our suppliers and support women by opening the door to greater networks and pitch opportunities through more transparent and open procurement practices.

“We need to look beyond fixing the internals of our current businesses and ask ourselves what can we do externally – as agencies, as marketers, as world-builders, and game-changers – to help women help us build better?”

Brideson is grateful to have been chosen as a badass woman for all the work she has done for the advertising landscape in Australia pushing forward women’s representation with #WaiveTogether as well as with her break-through female-focused creative work such as AFLW’s first campaign ‘I’d Like To See That’.

“Let’s all be badasses together, ” Brideson said, “I’m calling on global brands, high-level marketers and anyone else who is willing to leverage their power and influence to help female-founded agencies get the opportunities they deserve.”

Brideson will be appearing on the Cannes Lions ‘Badass Women’ panel on Thursday from 3 to 4 PM. She will be joined by two other panellists Annastasia Seebohm, Group CEO of Quintessentially and Adrianne Smith, Founder of Cannes Can: Diversity Collective.