9957: Now Send Culturally Clueless To Class.

The press release for the 2012 4A’s Transformation Conference featured the following:

In addition, Ron Berger, former Euro RSCG executive and a founder of Advertising Week, shared news on a separate talent initiative. The High School of Innovation and Media (IAM), which Berger co-founded and is sponsored by the 4A’s, is getting ready to graduate its first senior class. Some of those students presented at the first TEDx Harlem conference on Tuesday. They created an integrated campaign in support of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” effort to combat childhood obesity.

Four years after launching IAM, the industry is now four more years away from realizing the grand experiment’s potential—provided the senior class members graduate from a 4-year college program. Whatever.

As the Impact Study indicates, ventures like IAM only address half of the real problem. That is, schooling minorities won’t do much good until someone erects an institution of higher learning to educate and reform the industry’s White majority. Unless we confront the fact that the culturally clueless inhabiting corner offices have created minority-unfriendly workplaces, the IAM students would be better served receiving 40 acres and a mule.

9956: C’MON WHITE MAN! Episode 20.

(MultiCultClassics credits ESPN’s C’MON MAN! for sparking this semi-regular blog series.)

Advertising Age provided a snapshot of last week’s 4A’s conference in Los Angeles, including the following excerpt:

It’s been talked about for years, but it bears repeating: Agencies need to commit to hiring a diverse workforce at all levels. If they don’t, they risk creating work that doesn’t appeal to the changing demography of the nation. Speaking openly, Ogilvy North American Chairman-CEO John Seifert said the agency received its latest cultural survey last week, and called it “depressing” because “we hadn’t achieved what we set out to do.”

Ogilvy North American Chairman-CEO John Seifert represents the crème de la culturally clueless on Madison Avenue. He is among the leaders who publicly declare a commitment to diversity, yet personally and professionally don’t do a damn thing to address the situation. Rather, guys like Seifert wring their hands and furrow their brows, feigning deep concern when asked to comment on the subject.

In 2009, Seifert confessed the industry is “not exactly leading the way” in regards to diversity, and he admitted his agency was “not blind to the fact that there is so much more to do to recognize our ambitions.” The remarks were delivered while Seifert was rubbing elbows with Rev. Al Sharpton at the NAACP’s 100th anniversary celebration.

In 2011, Seifert “soft-launched” OgilvyCulture with all the enthusiasm of an Old White Guy attending a Black History Month event. At the time, Seifert admitted, “…[If] there has been a weakness in the marketing communications industry generally, it’s that the makeup of agencies is not reflective” of the consumers to whom they advertise. Regarding OgilvyCulture, Seifert said, “We’re feeling our way; I’ve said to everyone this is going to be messy for a while.” When has an agency leader ever predicted messiness for a new venture except when it involved the integration of minorities?

The Impact Study probably caught Seifert off guard, as the survey indicated minority employees held positive feelings about working at Ogilvy. Seifert responded with a statement saying, “While we are grateful to see our progress recognized, we still have so much to do in attracting and retraining the best and brightest talent from the cross-cultural landscape we serve.” Did Seifert make a Freudian slip, accidentally inserting “retraining” for “retaining”? A week later at the 4A’s soiree, Seifert showed signs of clinical depression over his agency’s failure to meet its diversity goals. What did he see that the Impact Survey participants did not?

Why are passive racists like Seifert permitted to keep their jobs when they consistently fail to create meaningful and measurable results with diversity? In every other area of our business, leaders are held accountable for success. Yet when it comes to replacing exclusivity with inclusivity, it’s completely acceptable to get away with a substandard performance—provided you hone the ability to act with contriteness and fake bipolar mania.

C’MON WHITE MAN!

9935: Being Open With Recruiting Tactics…?

The New York Times reported on a new 4A’s brainchild designed to recruit young people to the advertising industry. The online video looks like someone tried to sneak a diversity initiative into the project too. However, if one really wants to woo a youth audience, don’t do it with work that appears to have been conceived and executed by, well, Old White Guys. The grand scheme is called Open Advertising, which sounds oxymoronic. Wonder if the openness will include revealing the issues surrounding diversity—as well as gender and ageism. Plus, the Digital Set being targeted should be apprised that digital salaries are lower than traditional advertising salaries.

Pitching the Ad Life to the Digital Set

By Stuart Elliott

THE leading trade organization for advertising agencies is intensifying efforts to cast a wider net when recruiting employees with an initiative aimed not only at students, but also at talented younger people who work in other industries.

Executives of the organization, known as the Four A’s, are to describe the initiative during their annual Transformation conference, to be held in Beverly Hills, Calif., beginning on Monday and concluding on Wednesday.

The centerpiece of the initiative, called Open Advertising, will be a video-focused Web site, openadvertising.aaaa.org, that is to go live on Wednesday. It is meant to address a survey last year that concluded the industry was falling short in its attempts to attract and keep talented employees.

The contents of the Web site will be devoted to subjects like creativity, technology and agency work life. Another survey, conducted this year by two Four A’s members, Colle & McVoy and Partners & Napier, found considerable misconceptions on those subjects among the target audience.

“The No. 1 thing you hear from students and young people in other fields is, ‘Wow, I didn’t think you could do that in advertising,’ ” said Andrew Benett, global chief executive of Arnold Worldwide, part of Havas. He is to announce the initiative during the conference along with Sharon Napier, president and chief executive of Partners & Napier, part of Project WorldWide, and Nancy Hill, president and chief executive of the Four A’s.

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The goal is “to tell the story of the industry in a high-touch, high-engagement way,” Mr. Benett said, and show advertising in a way that makes it appealing to “career switchers” as well as those seeking their first jobs.

Mr. Benett acknowledged that “you can never ‘solve’ the talent problem for the industry, because talent is going to constantly evolve.” But the industry needs to move beyond “a communications effort or a P.R. campaign,” he added, and address its recruitment problems in a substantive manner.

Among the initial participants in Open Advertising, Ms. Hill said, are digital and social media specialists like Razorfish, R/GA, Rokkan and Socialistic as well as agencies like Arnold Worldwide; Deutsch; Euro RSCG; McGarryBowen; McKinney; Mullen; JWT; Rapp; Saatchi & Saatchi; and Y&R.

“Three months ago, I was on a panel and someone asked, ‘How do I get into advertising?’” Ms. Hill said. “We want to make it easy to answer.”

“This is about bringing in a generation that’s been content creators all their lives,” she added, on social media like Facebook and YouTube, “and making advertising the preferred career choice for talent of all stripes.”

To underline the target audience for Open Advertising, anyone will be able to watch video clips on the Web site but to comment, share content or upload work, visitors will need to log in through their Facebook accounts.

The discussion of the initiative is among steps being taken by Ms. Hill and the Four A’s to make the conference agenda more compelling than “a bunch of agency talking heads saying the same stuff over and over,” as she put it.

•

Speakers and panelists are to include Rebecca Campbell, president of the ABC Owned Television Stations Group; Charlie Collier, president at AMC Networks, whose AMC channel presents “Mad Men”; Carolyn Everson, vice president for global marketing solutions at Facebook; Jack J. Haber, vice president for global advertising and digital at Colgate-Palmolive; Jason Kilar, chief executive of Hulu; J.B. Perrette, chief digital officer at Discovery Communications; Robert Pittman, chief executive of Clear Channel Media and Entertainment; Randall Rothenberg, president and chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau; Larry Scott, commissioner of the Pacific-12 Conference; Kristin van Ogtrop, managing editor of Real Simple magazine; and Chuck Woolery, the former game show host who is now a “senior citizen marketing specialist” at Western Creative.

The fact that registrations for the conference, at 1,300, are higher than had been expected indicates that “a lot of people think they’re going to get value out of it,” said Chuck Porter, the 2010-12 chairman of the Four A’s who is also chairman of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, part of MDC Partners, and chief strategist of MDC.

“People are busy, and the Four A’s has begun to understand this is business,” Mr. Porter said. “Nobody feels comfortable flying off to Bermuda.” (In 2000 and 2005, the organization, formerly the American Association of Advertising Agencies, held its annual management conference, a predecessor to the Transformation conference, in Southampton, Bermuda.)

“It’s less about socializing and golfing,” said Greg Stern, a Four A’s board member who is chief of Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, and more about offering “a results-oriented conference” with “substantive, significant topics relevant to everyone in the business.”

9924: Invisible Admen And Adwomen.

From Advertising Age…

Silent Minorities: Industry Employees Speak Out About Adland Isolation

Results of Study Called ‘Very Disenchanting, But Not Surprising’

By Ken Wheaton

The average ad-industry employee likely agrees the diversity issue is a very unfortunate situation. One that should be remedied. By someone. But on a daily basis, he’s likely to carry on, figuring for the most part the industry will evolve and that his nonwhite coworkers are content with the state of adland.

The reality, according to a new study, is that a whopping 74% of minority employees in the industry agree that “My experience as an employee from a multicultural background is different from my colleagues’.”

The Impact Study, conducted by cross-cultural talent consultancy Tangerine-Watson, surveyed a total of 831 ad-industry professionals of various races and across general-market and ethnic shops between September and December of 2011.

The study’s numbers likely won’t shock anyone who’s paying attention to the issue. As 4A’s CEO Nancy Hill said, “It is very disenchanting, but not surprising at the same time.” Carol Watson, founder and CEO of Tangerine-Watson, called the results “sad and concerning.”

But one thing this survey provides is actual voices from those responding. What comes through is mostly a sense of resignation tinged with sadness.

“I try to keep my cultural preferences outside of work. … Since there isn’t much diversity I just have to go along with the flow,” wrote one respondent.

Another wrote about feeling excluded “when nobody [in the office] introduced themselves to me.”

“Many other people are allowed to just ‘be.’ As a black man I often have to shield my ‘real’ self a bit. I wish I could be as open as others. It’s something they don’t even recognize.”

Gender came up in a number of comments. Indeed, men (37%) felt more strongly than women (27%) that their experiences were “very much different” than their white colleagues.

Why does any of this matter? Obviously, aside from doing what’s right, it’s good for business to have ad agencies reflect the reality of the world we live in. One of the 4A’s most recent diversity efforts is called “Competitive Edge” for just that reason.

And it can be bad for business when a creative team overlooks important cultural cues in a campaign. For all the social-media outcries in 2011, the No. 10 most-read story on AdAge.com last year was “Nivea Pulls Ad, Apologizes After Racism Accusations.”

But even speaking up to voice concerns about such things comes with its own baggage. “Simply being aware of the presence (or lack thereof) of racial overtones in our advertising concepts and being turned to as the one to call it out is an unwritten responsibility—and I fear an unwritten liability,” wrote one respondent.

And there’s also the worry of being stigmatized as a complainer. Wrote another: “I have been treated differently for expressing negative feelings vs. my white colleagues.”

That’s not to say everything boiled down to race. When asked what they liked least about the ad industry, whites, African-Americans and Asian-Americans all picked “instability” as the top choice. “Instability” was the No. 2 choice among Hispanics, with “challenge balancing work and personal life” being the No. 1 dislike.

That said, lack of diversity does play a major role when it comes time for employees to decide whether or not to say in adland. African-Americans (33%) and Latinos (21%) were more likely to cite lack of racial and ethnic diversity as a very important reason for leaving the industry, compared to whites (4%).

For an industry that’s been hammered over this issue off and on since the late 1960s without a great deal of progress to show for it, keeping the minorities it has is just as important as recruiting fresh talent.

Ms. Watson hopes that the answers to the surveys—as well as a more granular look at the data and follow-up surveys—will provide some guidance for agencies.

Looking at some of the responses regarding those times multicultural employees actually felt included, some of the fixes don’t exactly require an industry-wide initiative. Being invited to meetings, being included in award-submission processes, being consulted on anything from creative to the new offices—these were among the things that made respondents feel more included.

Another step agency employees could take? Perhaps realizing that not everyone sees the time period portrayed in “Mad Men” as something to admire. (Responded one person to the scenario “I feel excluded”: “When they had a “Mad Men’ party.”)

But internship programs and affinity groups and mentoring and reverse-mentoring opportunities were also all mentioned by respondents. And that’s where agency executives and the industry as a whole have to step in.

“I’ve never been shy about saying we have work to do,” said the 4A’s Ms. Hill. “Our actions … have cultural cues we just need to think about, especially when we’re the majority culture.”

Which general-market agencies are doing right by way of diversity? Ogilvy & Mather and Wieden & Kennedy came in tops across the categories among non-Caucasian respondents.

In a statement, Ogilvy & Mather North America Chairman-CEO John Seifert said: “While we are grateful to see our progress recognized, we still have so much to do in attracting and retraining the best and brightest talent from the cross-cultural landscape we serve.”

Regarding Wieden & Kennedy, former employee Jimmy Smith chairman-CEO-chief creative officer of Amusement Park Entertainment, said, “It’s incredible what Dan [Wieden] and Dave [Kennedy] have accomplished … especially miraculous when you consider that Portland [Oregon] is one of the whitest joints on the planet.”

What does Wieden have that others don’t? No. 1, said Mr. Smith, is its client roster. “Cool attracts cool,” as he put it. But it’s not just Nike. “Dan and Dave have love for people of color. Dave has been heavily involved with the American Indian College Fund since I’ve known him. And it’s true: Dan wishes he could be reborn as a Black jazz musician. …John Jay is a partner at W&K and he’s Asian. He helped me immensely with my transition into W&K, and I’m sure he’s helped many others since I left.”

Much of which affirms something else Ms. Hill said. “The clear message in all of this is [that] it starts with the CEO.”

9908: C’MON WHITE MAN! Episode 18.

(MultiCultClassics credits ESPN’s C’MON MAN! for sparking this semi-regular blog series.)

4A’s Agency Thought Leader Compensation Summit allowed a bunch of industry honchos to ponder payment plans between clients and agencies. The headline whiner was TBWA\Worldwide Global Director of Media Arts Lee Clow, who declared, “Unfortunately, in our business, we get paid like we’re doing our clients’ laundry. We haven’t figured out that the ideas that we create can become a very powerful asset to the brands we work for. Many of the ideas—whether they be slogans or advertising forms and styles or a voice that we create for brands—could be listed on the balance sheet of our clients as an asset with millions and millions of dollars in value.”

Gee, it’s always fun to watch a speech about being underpaid delivered by a multimillionaire.

If Clow is truly clueless about the compensation schemes fueling our business, he ought to call Omnicom CEO and President John Wren. Maybe Wren will explain how contracts, cronyism and Corporate Cultural Collusion stifle competition and ultimately turn advertising agencies into generic commodities. Why, just peep PepsiCo and Quaker Oats to realize Omnicom has effectively established that Goodby, Silverstein and Partners and TBWA\Chiat\Day are parity with Juniper Park and Fathom Communications. Plus, it’s a safe bet that Clow received stupid money when his shop was sold to the global holding company. Perhaps “we haven’t figured out that the ideas that we create can become a very powerful asset to the brands we work for” because folks such as Clow were too busy collecting their cuts from corporate mergers and buyouts.

But wait, there’s more. While the iconic White advertising agencies are paid like they’re doing their clients’ laundry, the minority shops are stuck fighting over the lint in the dryer filters. And that’s no ancient Chinese secret, Mr. Lee Clow.

C’MON WHITE MAN!