Advertising's Boys Club

In addition to being a successful strategist highly soughtafter consultant and prolific thoughtleader on a variety of topics from fandoms to crypto to gaming Scaman has also written persuasively on the business case for diversity and inclusion and well understands how sexism and racism continue to intersect in advertising To wit she credits Cindy Gallop for being quotahead of the gamequot in 2017 when she delivered the closing keynote at the 3 ConferenceIn her remarks Gallop quoted Rebecca Traister39s assertion that quotthe history of America has been one of wholly mediocre white men wielding unearned influencequot and went on to connect the dots quotYour audience must be your team When you start the ad agency of tomorrow your team needs to look like your consumers and you know exactly what I39m talking about Diversity drives innovation amp8230 diversity raises the fucking bar I am so tired of how very low the creative bar has been set in our industry for decades by the white male dominance that has held our industry in a state of stasis while sexual harassment prevents the progression of women or female creatives or female leadersquotSince Gallop has been speaking out on advertising39s lack of diversity since at least 2013 I thought I would use this column to excerpt below and adapt an article I published that same year entitled The Ghosts of Mad Men Race and Gender Inequality Inside American Advertising Agencies in The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture The full version is freely available hereThough the gender gap is certainly not unique to advertising the industry tends to structure sex inequalities along the departmental split between account and creative an infamous rivalry cultivated by management and agency personnel alike While the account management aspect of advertising which interfaces directly with the client has become increasingly gendered as a female space creative which generates the ideas for campaigns has remained stubbornly maleAccording to my informants a rigid gender system presumes that men make the product creative while women do the paperwork account This relationship was often described in maternal terms with female account executives having to continually quotnagquot the male creatives to meet deadlines and even show up at meetings where the men would often arrive late put their feet up on the table and expect women no matter their actual role to be secretaries quotVery rarely do they have notebooks very rarely do they write anything down amp8230 and they say 39So you39re taking all the notes right39quotI spoke to one of these men and he summed up the dynamic as the machinations of a boysamp160club plain and simple quotI think it was easier for women to transition from the roles of secretaries and assistants in whatever the sixties or seventies to you know the account side amp8230 the creative side is more male dominated amp8230 I mean look at Mad Men it39s a boysamp160club it39s been a boys club it will always be a boys club until something drastic happens amp8230 it works like this I get my executive creative position at an agency so what do I do I hire all my boys so it will be a fun atmosphere you know So that39s what happens Everyone hires their boys those boys go somewhere else and they hire their boys and they hire the juniors that they likedquotOther scholars have made similar observations Michelle Gregory in her article Inside the Locker Room Male Homosociability in the Advertising Industry argues that the predominance of men in ad agency creative departments cultivates an exclusive lockerroom style of homosociability reminiscent of formal old boysamp160networks where men bond through humor and banterAnd in his book Advertising Cultures Gender Commerce Creativity Sean Nixon describes the culture of creatives as marked by quotladdishquot behavior that is both willfully immature and hypermasculine In such an environment managers treat the creative department as a quotNever Neverlandquot where women are not welcome lest they quotforce the young male creatives to grow up and thus erode the essential juvenilityquot of their creative roleThe discrimination of the Mad Men era has built up a durable gender role infrastructure in advertising whereby upper management remains a quotmale spacequot through tacit rules and cultural norms that have developed over time And while the glass ceiling may have been technically cracked and in some cases even broken by pioneering women since then Scaman39s reporting reveals how the industry39s misogyny persists in the shadows thanks in large part to NDAs that cover up abuses and enable predatorsHere39s hoping that powerful men both on the agency and client side will finally take heed of women like Scaman and Gallop take responsibility for a boys club they helped create and make this year39s Fourth of July a declaration of independence from advertising39s sexist past and presentClick the social buttons to share 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Advertising's Boys Club

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Christopher Boulton

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Advertising's Boys Club

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