The issue of ethnic diversity in the creative industries is one that has drawn much attention over recent months.
Comedian Lenny Henry has led the charge for BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) representation in media, while radio presenter Iain Lee made ill-considered on-air asides in relation to black and Asian radio shows. The resignations of senior politicians also continues to raise questions around diversity and representation at the top level of UK government.
For me, what all the above examples have in common is that they underline a certain lacking when it comes to this question of diversity: a lack of representation, imagination and space.
An article in Marketing Week from last year highlights the need for marketing teams to be more diverse in order to improve their outputs. It’s a fact that our industry is lagging behind in drawing in talent from BAME backgrounds. The onus falls on us to interrogate why: do our teams, as marketers, fully reflect the diversity of a multi-cultural Britain? Are we taking the issue seriously enough?
For me, it’s all in the approach. Diversity is a mindset. It’s demonstrating an active willingness to not just replicate ideas, activity and teams in your own image. It’s about challenging ourselves with the development and implementation of a methodology that seeks to create and generate through thoughtfully embedding difference in business.
If managed correctly, a diverse workforce brings a widened perspective and cultural insights that can build into stronger strategic outputs. Through building these insights into our campaigns, they’ll not only resonate with minority audiences, but also go further in unlocking the potential to make audiences realise that they exist in each other’s worlds. Apprehension in opening up businesses, teams and creativity to a wider variety of perspectives will only serve to limit productivity.
It’s not about trying to speak on behalf of audiences. Rather, we need to invite and allow audiences to speak for themselves. As marketers, it’s our job and responsibility to provide them with a platform to do so. I’m fortunate enough to work closely with the young people of Live Mag UK every day. They are a multiracial team of young people, from an array of social backgrounds, united by a common purpose to tell powerful, uncensored stories.
From idea generation and content creation to interacting with their audiences, both digitally and in-person, these are young people who reflect the audiences to which they speak. In providing a creative platform for marginalised youth voices, they function as visible role models for minority ethnic young people who themselves are looking to break into the creative industries.
Supported by professional industry mentors, they’re a highly creative team of cross-cultural code-switchers, gifted with an acute ability to decode language in a way that I believe that bold, innovative creative will increasingly demand.
So what are we doing to integrate these young people, whose knowledge and experiences are informed by an innate hybrid cultural sensibility, into our teams? What messages are we sending out, if any, through our work and in our workplace environments that tell these young people that this is a world in which there’s space for them?
It would be the biggest failure on the part of businesses to sideline this emergent talent. We must create opportunities for this culturally creative class to influence the conversation in order to propel fresh thinking and new ideas into our businesses.
When we talk of “diversity” in agencies, what we’re talking about is reform. We need modernised agency models and renewed approaches that will allow our teams to better reflect the reality of racial, ethnic and cultural experience. We need ethnic minorities in our teams because there are ethnic minorities in life. There can no longer be any excuses for this simple fact not being reflected in our workforce.
We need bold, visionary leaders to enable innovation, and to step up and acknowledge that diversity begins with the individual’s mindset.
Adopt it, or risk being left behind.
Will de Groot is a junior planner at Livity
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