The cover image (reproduced without cropping below) is a picture of what the average Australian ECD/CCO looks like. It is not a guess. It is a composite created by an algorithm and AI (for complete objectivity) of the faces of 63 real Australian ECDs and CCOs.
According to another Microsoft algorithm, he is male, 36 years old, white and 40% bearded.
If you’ve been paying attention to who leads what agency in Aus, you are probably not surprised. You should be disappointed – at best. You might even be horrified. That’s good. This type of homogeneity does not suggest that adland Australia is well-equipped to do its job of reaching all Australians in meaningful ways.
This type of homogeneity isn’t an age-old tradition in Australian advertising. Esther Clerehan noted last night, at an event hosted by Ogilvy at The Glue Society, that when she joined Ogilvy & Mather in 1977, the creative department was 50% female. Something had gone awry by the time I joined Ogilvy & Mather eight years later – I was the only female in the creative department in Sydney – but by 1988 it was 50% female. It also had a 52-year-old art director working with a 21-year-old writer. That art director created the Carefree, Girls Just Want to Have Fun campaign, which revolutionised tampon advertising before Libra was even a brand. I’d like to note that advertising is also unrepentantly ageist and shooting itself in the foot for being so. Why is very simple.
1.) Wisdom and experience count. 2.) Data can NOT tell you what a group feels like, thinks like or how it wants to be spoken to. The advertising that’s out there right now demonstrates that.
Sadly for the industry, the importance of age diversity is still being denied. (An unhappy parallel to how Australia’s political leaders are dealing with climate change, in my view.) I will do anything I can to support removing ageism from Australian advertising for its own good [:ed].
Apparently, no great strides have been made in creating racial diversity in the industry either.
The Australian creative leader image grew from an idea created during a D&AD/The Glue Society Brief To Broadcast workshop two years ago by two young Ogilvy creatives, Ava Frawley and Jasmine Subrata. The brief was to create an online campaign that challenges advertising agencies in regard to how they think about diversity and how they hire. Frawley and Subrata won the support of The Glue Society co-founder, Jonathan Kneebone that day with their idea, Changing The Face. The idea is now a fully-fledged project also supported by Microsoft & AdNews. It is not lip service to diversity. It’s not a blame game. Nor is it just an image. It’s a resource to foster and facilitate change. The pair is inviting every agency to submit its employee data to changingtheface.com.au to see the face of that agency. By updating its data, each agency will then be able to plot its own progress as well as the progress of the industry.
If agencies are to be able to say credibly that they can solve clients’ problems, surely they need to show that they can solve their own problem first.
Here are the faces leading advertising creativity right now.
https://youtu.be/Ka0cz8PxHb0
