The advertising industry has been hit hard this year by allegations of discrimination and the related resignations of high-profile agency executives. With the release in late September of the 3% Conference’s “Elephant on Madison Avenue” survey, which confirms reports of widespread sexual harassment and gender bias, pressure for change has intensified. Now, it seems, corporate clients have joined the chorus.
In a recent story, “Brands to Ad Agencies: Diversify or Else,” the New York Timesrevealed actions at least three major brands are taking to force this traditionally white, male industry to hire more women and minorities.
As a woman who faced discrimination on Madison Avenue in the 1960s, I couldn’t agree more that the “Mad Men” culture needs to change. Women and minorities should have fair and equal access to opportunity—and in the small agency I ran from the late 1970s through the ‘90s, they did—but imposing quotas, which is essentially what General Mills, HP and Verizon are doing, is absolutely the wrong remedy for the problem.
Quotas are the death knell for creativity—one very salient point that appears to be absent from the “demand” corporate executives are now making. If Madison Avenue has any chance of keeping its creative edge, talent must be hired without regard to gender, race, religion or core beliefs and then nourished, not funneled through a corporatized system fraught with political correctness and quotas. It is essential for the agency, as well as potential employees, that new hires be brought in for the right reasons and not because an overweening client is demanding a quota.
Hiring by quota can also have unintended consequences. If an agency is forced to hire a less qualified candidate (or is perceived to have done so) due to an imposed quota, the actions can backfire, e.g., impacting quality of work, hurting employee relationships within the agency or prompting charges of tokenism. Michael Fanuele, chief creative officer of General Mills, raised this very point in the New York Times story, criticizing the way agencies pitched his company after being advised about its diversity goals. But is it not a fact that quotas breed just that? On one hand, he insists on diversity and then he criticizes attempts to achieve it.
I had an experience in my own career when the reassurance that I would not be forced to hire a candidate helped me to be more open to hiring her. I was interviewing for an assistant art director’s job when the publisher of the company asked me to speak with, and consider hiring, a recent émigré from Russia. When I was told she was a 45-year-old woman, I was less than optimistic. When she came for the interview she brought some of her work from the Russian (Soviet) magazine where she had worked for over twenty years, which, as expected was highly stylized. And yet I discovered while speaking with her, that despite her broken English, she was not only a delightful person, she was, with some guidance, just as qualified as any of the applicants I had interviewed. She worked with us for several years and became an invaluable member of our team.
I was an anomaly as a female art director in the 1960s and ’70s. With women accounting for only 11.5% of creative directors today, agencies should be paying attention to hiring qualified women. As Wendy Clark, chief executive of DDB Worldwide, North America, points out in “Ad Industry Tries to Leave ‘Mad Men’ Mentality Behind,” a recent Wall Street Journal article on this subject, “If we only recruit from a narrow, homogenous part of society and ad schools, that’s crazy.” And so are quotas.