Diversity comes in many forms; Christmas conundrum; and an OOH shoot-out

Dominic Mills assesses adland’s often uncomfortable diversity issues. Plus: sifting through the post-Christmas advertising detritus, and bracing for further out-of-home M&A activity

If I was a teacher laying out A-level class targets for 2019, the issue of how adland should progress on the subject of diversity is a tricky one.

Last week saw the IPA release its latest diversity census figures, revealing a fuzzy picture, compounded by two factors: one, a declining response rate amongst members and two, the fact that we do not know – data privacy cited as the reason – which agencies completed the survey.

Let’s start with the better(ish) news on the female/male divide. There, some progress is evident. Among all agencies, women now make up over 50% of the workforce, and higher in media agencies (54.8%) than creative (50.5%).

But progress up the greasy pole is slow. There is some movement in the right direction in the C-suite, where women now make up 32.7%, up 1.5pp in the year. Splitting this by agency type and going down as far as the ‘senior staff level’, media agencies outperform their creative siblings by far here – 49.3% compared to 39.3%. I can’t say I am especially surprised by this.

But looking at the overall picture, the levels are falling once you get below the exec and heads of department levels. And the further down the structures you go, the worse it gets. At the lowest levels, women make up 58% of the workforce, 0.6pp higher than a year ago.

Now there is a possible explanation for this, which is that agencies are succeeding in their efforts to improve the sex balance, starting with first-job recruitment. But it clearly takes time – how much though? – for this to feed through into more equal representation higher up. You could also say, taking the positive line, that attempts to make the working environment more family-friendly are slowly paying off, evidenced by the gradual progress of women up the ladder.

So, a smallish cheer here. But less so when it comes to BAME levels and progress. BAME representation is up, at 13.8% overall. Some will say this is OK, and roughly in line with national representation. But is it really? You might not like it, but adland is a London-centric business, and in London the BAME proportion is at the high 30% level. So I would say it could do better than 13.8% if recruitment efforts were improved.

As you would expect coming off this small base, BAME progress up organisational structures is painfully slow. At the C-suite level there is some progress – a 6.6% representation with a 0.4pp improvement. But BAMEs are going backwards at the senior and middle levels, where representation is respectively 9.8% (down 0.7pp) and 12% (down 0.6pp). And BAMEs are most concentrated at the bottom levels, where they make up 16.9% of the workforce, up 0.5pp.

Now you can take the positive spin on this, which is that the pipeline is filling up – recruitment efforts have to start with first-jobbers – and that in time we will see progress.

Or you could be slightly less positive and say that it’s painfully slow, and unless BAME progress into the higher levels accelerates, recruitment efforts at the bottom will founder. That is because there is probably a close link between recruitment and progress, insofar as the more role models there are – acting as beacons inside organisations or going outside to schools and further education – the better recruitment and, crucially, retention, will be. BAMEs will be disinclined to join or stay if they can’t see a way to progress their careers. [advert position=”left”]

But there’s another kind of diversity which needs to be considered, the lack of which is perhaps more insidious because it is less visible. This diversity comes in many forms. At its most basic, it is about the prevalence of privately educated white males, many with Oxbridge or Russell Group university degrees and from middle-class backgrounds.

You can read a revealing piece here.

So what might this diversity include? School and further education – both place and subject – obviously. But many other factors too, among them: where they grew up, such as urban, suburban or rural childhoods; family background, including nuclear or one-parent families and parental occupation/s; neurodiversity, a principle championed by Direct Line CMO Mark Evans; age; and life-stage, including parents returning to the workforce or second-career people.

In a sense, we have to think nature and nurture here, and concentrate very hard on not recruiting in our own image or according to some complicated box-ticking representational score.

As we all know from our everyday experiences, people from different backgrounds think and behave differently from the way we do. Sometimes it’s hard to handle, but it’s never less than interesting, challenging and educational. Which is exactly how the industry should be and what diversity at every level promises.

Post-Christmas detritus

Mercifully, most people have packed Christmas away and can focus on getting on with normal life. But not retailers or their ad industry partners who, as seasonal trading performances become clear, must now assess their efforts.

There’s one key question they need to answer: did our Christmas ads work, and what should we do next year?

Aldi (+10.4%), Lidl (+9.4%) and Tesco (+2.17%) look like winners and are unlikely to change their strategies next time round. Sainsbury’s (down 1.1% in food and 2.3% in non-food – i.e. Argos) and M&S (down 2.1% in food and 2.4% in non-food) will have bigger questions to answer. Debenhams – a crap Christmas, and no surprise there.

M&S boss Steve Rowe, who dropped the retailer’s traditional Christmas blockbuster ad (OK, patchy of late) in favour of a product-focused effort, defended the ad on the grounds that sales of advertised lines saw record performances, although he didn’t say whether this included David Gandy’s washing-up gloves.

John Lewis accompanied a 1% like-for-like rise with both a claim that its Christmas ad is incredibly important and a warning that staff might not get their traditional annual bonuses. But how much of this was down to the heavy discounting available for all shoppers to see? Conversely, how much did Sainsbury’s reluctance to discount hurt it?

It’s complicated, isn’t it?

At its heart, I think we can boil this down to a simple choice for Christmas ads: flog the brand, or promote the products? Historically, Christmas ads have focused on the brand, with lots of nice, warm, cuddly messages. This involved taking a long-term view and hoping – fingers crossed – that any residue of customer warmth sustained the brand well into the succeeding year. By and large, this worked, although it’s hard to say to what extent retailers ever tried to measure the longer-term effects of their Christmas efforts.

But that is no longer a guaranteed route. As Mullen Lowe’s Lawrence Green put it in November last year, for many retailers the perfect storm is such that it’s about ‘winning the season’ – or, for the likes of Debenhams, month-by-month survival – rather than winning the war. I’d hazard a guess that, judging by M&S’s verdict on Christmas, a less-than-predicted-by-analysts downturn in sales constitutes success.

Like Green then, I think that the days of the mega production number Christmas ads are behind us, unless retailers can find a way to combine brand and product together – by no means unachievable – and take the trouble to measure the longer-term impact on brand.

I suspect that the pressure on retailers is such that it’s hard for them to even think about this, but hats off to Tesco for also reporting the various brand effects of its Christmas campaign. It clearly moved the brand needle: strongest improvement in NPS in five years, quality perception plus 3.5 points and value perception plus 4.5. Not bad for an ad I have already forgotten.

Shoot-out at OOH corral

With an apology to any fans of Westerns for mangling the title of a favourite of that genre in pursuit of a headline, two events last week indicate we could be heading for an M&A shoot-out in the world of OOH.

The first was the stock market listing of Ocean. This has been a long time coming and the delay may have cost it its chance to acquire either one or more of Exterion, Outdoor Plus and Primesight, all of which were snapped up by Global late last year.

Public companies that stand still get short shrift from investors, so the pressure will be on Ocean to grow or – seeing as organic growth can be slow – use its status and currency – i.e. its shares – to buy sooner rather than later. That’s good news for the long-tail of OOH contractors.

The second piece of news was the return to the US stock market of Clear Channel some time in the next few months. Clear Channel has effectively been in a corporately-induced coma brought on by the travails of its parent, iHeart Media, and thus forced to sit on its hands for almost a year. You can see this in the way revenues, as listed on an SEC document, have hardly moved over the last two years, down from £2.67bn in 2016 to $2.58bn in 2017 and, on a nine-month basis in 2018, $1.9bn.

This too could be good news for the rest of the industry. While it is a significant player in its home market, Clear Channel is also diversified internationally. But coming out of its coma, it has to make up time – hence boss William Eccleshare telling Campaign last week that he was eyeing up M&A opportunities. As the world’s most developed digital OOH market, the UK could well feature on his list.

If Clear Channel comes hunting in the UK market, it will no doubt find itself up against Ocean in the M&A shoot-out driving acquisition prices higher. But Clear Channel might also be the hunted. There are big US players like Lamar and Outfront, as well as the daddy of the global scene, JCDecaux.

It’s going to be interesting, and it’s likely to be soon too. As the OOH world consolidates, time is running out.