IPA president Tom Knox has said much more needs to be done to improve diversity in agencies.
New figures released by the IPA reveal that employees from a black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) background account for just 13.1% of media agency staff, prompting president Tom Knox to outline ‘ambitious’ plans to improve diversity over the next four years.
As part of Knox’s agenda to reassert the future of the ad industry as a ‘culturally, social and economically force for good’, the IPA has set a 15% target for 2020, by when six in 10 people in agency leadership positions should be from a non-white background.
While the current figure may ring alarm bells, it is significantly higher than BAME employees found in FTSE 100 companies, where just 3.5% of senior executives are from a BAME background.
At 14.5%, media agencies have a slightly higher percentage of BAME employees compared with creative agencies (12.3%); however, of the 8% of those at the top end of the seniority scale (chair, CEO, MD) who are from a non-white background, this is notably higher at creative agencies (10.8%) than it is in media agencies (2.9%).
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Knox said that much more needs to be done to improve standards of diversity across the media industry.
“13.1% BAME representation isn’t going to be good enough in the future and the fact that only 8% of the most senior people in our biggest agencies come from a non-white background concerns me,” Knox said.
“If we are to realise our goals, we need to do much more to promote the proven business case of diversity in leadership teams which will require us to come together as an industry and re-think our strategies.”
However, in a recent Newsline article, ZenithOptimedia’s head of insight, Richard Shotton, says that there is strong evidence to suggest that the industry’s current attempts to promote diversity might have the opposite effect.
“The ‘public outcry’ approach to the lack of diversity taps into the bias of social proof. This is the idea that our behaviour, whether consciously or subconsciously, is strongly influenced by that of others,” writes Shotton.
“One of the most pressing problems in agency staffing is lack of diversity. But could our attempt to remedy this – by publicising the relative lack of BAMEs in ad agencies – actually be exacerbating the problem?”
