The $330 billion U.S. advertising industry shortchanges Black shoppers and their $1.6 trillion in spending power at its peril.
In June 2020, just weeks after a white police officer murdered unarmed George Floyd, AdAge obtained an internal memo from Top Five advertising agency Interpublic Group that showed just 2.6% of its executives were Black while 86% were white. Then-chairman and CEO Michael Roth didn’t need a public shaming to realize the numbers were abysmal. “We can all agree that we MUST do better,” Roth wrote in the memo, according to AdAge.
Since then, advertising firms and marketing departments at consumer-products companies have done better at pushing forward on executive representation. The industry, however, is backsliding in a different, essential way. While non-Hispanic white people comprise 59% of the U.S. population, white actors accounted for 72.5% of people who appeared in TV and digital video ads in 2022, according to a study by Extreme Reach, a global marketing logistics company. That marks an increase in white actors from 65.6% in 2021.
“People felt like they had to act, and so I think that there was a lot of acting.”
Shannon Washington, the U.S. chief creative officer for Interpublic Group subsidiary R/GA, said the study shows how the results for many marketing departments simply haven’t matched the sector’s rhetoric about diversity since the fateful spring of 2020.
“People felt like they had to act, and so I think that there was a lot of acting,” Washington told Forbes. This year, she became the first Black woman chief creative officer at a holding company of any of the five major ad agencies. “There was a lot of what I like to call pushing paper from one side of the table to the other and calling it work, and I think right now we’re at the place where we’re starting to see what stuck and what didn’t, what was real and what wasn’t.”
Decision-makers in the $330 billion U.S. advertising industry shortchange Black Americans at their peril. It’s not just about doing the right thing. Black spending power reached $1.6 trillion in 2021, and Black consumers are younger and more brand-aware than other groups, according to a report by international consulting firm McKinsey. Consumer attitudes are also trending toward social activism, with 77% of Gen Z shoppers telling a Deloitte survey that a company’s values are an important part of their purchasing decisions.
Shannon Washington, U.S. Chief Creative Officer for Interpublic Group subsidiary R/GA
Margarita CorporanAt the same time, 60% of consumers from diverse communities said last year they felt “invisible or underrepresented” in ads, up from 58% in 2021, according to a survey by the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing. The poll also found that the companies that ranked high on its diversity index saw the highest sales boosts from its ads.
The disconnect could jeopardize companies that don’t prioritize diversity in marketing, Myles Worthington, founder of Los Angeles-based marketing agency WORTHI, told Forbes. Worthington said every new generation “is getting much more LGBTQ+, much more gender fluid, much more multicultural in their makeup.
“So really this work is more of an act of creating business longevity,” said Worthington, a former Netflix
Extreme Reach said it analyzed 1 million ads that ran in North America between 2019 and October 2022. It tracked four racial groups — Black, white, Asian and Hispanic — and each of the three minority groups saw their share of actors shrink in 2022 versus 2021, with the share of Hispanic actors falling by nearly half. Male actors were much more numerous than females in the advertising, according to Extreme Reach.
“When you see those numbers, you expect them to be different because of the conversations going on around our industry and the world, frankly,” said Melinda McLaughlin, Extreme Reach’s chief marketing officer.
That said, marketing departments and C-suite decision-makers are slowly becoming more diverse. About 32.3% of marketing teams at companies and ad agencies were non-white in 2022, according to the Association of National Advertisers. The number has been growing each year since 2019, when the rate was 27.9%. For chief marketing officers and leaders with equivalent roles, non-white representation grew to 14.3% from 12% over that span.
Interpublic Group said in its most recent workforce data report that the percentage of Black workers grew to 9.3% in 2021 from 7.2% in 2019. For Black senior or executive level managers, that rate grew to 4.7% from 2.6% over that span. To put the numbers in perspective, Black Americans make up 10.3% of the country’s college graduates.
Myles Worthington, founder of Los Angeles-based marketing agency WORTHI
Erik UmpheryChanning Martin, the company’s global chief diversity and social impact officer, said the industry has made strides in increasing diversity among marketing teams, but more work is needed to reduce the persistence of stereotypes and traditional negative portrayals of women and people of color in those ads. “We know that the increase in Black presence on creative teams is important, but we also need to address accurate portrayals and the reinforcement of positive images” she said. “It's frustrating when the pace of progress for the industry does not match stated goals or action. The data show that we need to be open to course correction and how to make a bigger impact.”
In the middle of that slow progress it’s easy to forget how advertising firms and their corporate clients embraced Black Lives Matter in 2020. Agency Wieden+Kennedy Portland designed a Nike ad that was simply white words fading in and out on a black background. “Don’t turn your back on racism,” the TV commercial told viewers. “Don’t sit back and be silent. Let’s all be part of the change.” Businesses staged a #StopHateForProfit boycott of Facebook and Instagram because of the hateful messages allowed on the social-media streams, and Epic Games removed police cars from its popular game Fortnite in protest over law-enforcement practices.
Worthington said the ad industry has work to do not just on the quantity of diversity in ads, but also the quality. He said some brands try to squeeze multiple minority groups into an ad seemingly to check boxes, as opposed to running mainstream ads that are authentic to a particular group. He also lamented what he said is an overuse of interracial couples and an underuse of people with dark skin or curly hair.
“That’s beautiful, and that’s how a lot of families are,” Worthington said. “But I think there’s fear around showing Black love, I think there’s fear around showing a Latino family, I think there’s fear around showing dark-skinned people and their dark-skinned offspring.”
Washington, the groundbreaking R/GA executive, said diverse representation on teams is vital for creating diverse ads. So one of her focus areas is recruiting people from diverse backgrounds and helping ensure they stay in the industry — even if they don’t stay at her company.
She said when industry colleagues pointed out that she was the first Black woman chief creative officer at a Big Five subsidiary, the news was sobering.
“I’m really, really laser-focused on trying to make sure that there’s a pipeline and a pathway for another young woman to occupy this position,” Washington told Forbes. “If I do this right, there won’t be a 10-year gap between me and another woman of color.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the gender of Channing Martin, Interpublic Group’s global chief diversity and social impact officer.
MORE FROM FORBES
