ABSTRACT
Mad Men, the popular award-winning television series which dramatizes the lives and careers of men and women who work in a fictional 1960s-era New York City advertising agency, ended its seven-season run on the AMC-TV network in May 2015. Praised by many observers for its historical authenticity and stylistic accuracy of the period, the series offered an intriguing look into the workplace culture of the advertising business up until the early 1970s. A particularly interesting aspect of Mad Men was the show’s treatment of women and ethnic minorities, including the very limited role of AfricanAmerican women in the advertising workplace. The final episodes of Mad Men were greeted with great fanfare and widespread publicity as many viewers mourned the program’s conclusion. However, while nostalgic retrospectives flowed freely, some reminiscences about the show and its setting were unsettling. On the occasion of the series finale, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner was asked by trade publication Advertising Age to provide his opinion about the most surprising aspects of the advertising business. Weiner responded (Bruell, 2015):
Mad Men’s fictional setting illuminated a harsh truth about the real-world advertising business: historically, professional career opportunities for people of color and women – especially in managerial and executive roles – have been extremely low. Although contemporary advertising is more than a $540 billion global industry (eMarketer, 2014), its poor track record regarding diversity among its professional ranks has been called its “dirty little secret” (Winski, 1992, p. 16). The low rates of black participation in the advertising industry have drawn particular scrutiny and little seemed to change over time. For example, in the mid-1960s, Advertising Age ran a headline declaring:
“Negro Has Precarious Foothold in Agency Field” (Feehery, 1966) and, 42 years later, Adweek magazine referred to the industry as “a poster child for a dearth of diversity” (Newman, 2008). Employment statistics published in 1968 concerning 35 large New York ad agencies placed the overall “Negro” and “Puerto Rican” employment rates at 5.1 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively; among 16,062 total employees, with most positions concentrated in clerical jobs; moreover, African-Americans held less than 1 percent of managerial roles – or just four jobs out of a total of 415 management positions (City of New York, 1968, p. 5). By 2009, a report showed that black advertising professionals and managers combined accounted for 5.3 percent of the industry’s total employment (Bendick and Egan, 2009) and a 2012 New York Times article showed that of the 78,000 Americans working as advertising and promotion managers, 9.6 percent were Hispanic, 2.3 percent were Asian, and fewer than 1 percent were African-American (Vega, 2012). These figures underscored a low rate of industry participation and nearly no improvement for African-Americans over 40-plus years. Since the 1960s, various stakeholders and activist groups, including members of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the New York City Commission on Human Rights (NYCCHR), the National Urban League, and the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) repeatedly confronted Adland’s diversity problem. Over the years these efforts prompted the establishment of numerous industrysponsored, university and independent programs to encourage, recruit, train, and retain diverse peoples for advertising careers. In 2009, the NAACP and a prominent civil rights attorney launched the Madison Avenue Project – an initiative intended to prompt changes in employment practices in advertising firms – including the threat of a class action discrimination lawsuit aimed at the advertising industry (Patel, 2010). While there has been recent improvement in placements of young college graduates of color in entry-level advertising jobs, it is acknowledged that black advertising professionals often encounter significant challenges in their career trajectories (Bush, 2011; Vega, 2012). In addition to diversity issues concerning people of color, academic and trade sources revealed long-standing concerns regarding gender equality in the advertising industry, resulting in restricted career opportunities for women, especially with respect to high-level managerial positions (Mallia, 2009; Maclaran, Stephens, and Catterall, 1997; Still, 1986). Claiming that women comprised only 3 percent of advertising Creative Directors, in 2012 adwoman Kat Gordon founded the “3% Conference” – an organization which champions women to assume high-level creative positions and leadership roles in advertising firms (3% Conference, 2015). According to industry insiders, these and other efforts helped the proportion of women in creative leadership to rise to 11 percent by 2015, a significant increase (Batthany, 2015). Although white women fared better than African-Americans in advertising careers, a 2013 industry survey published in Advertising Age
revealed considerable levels of dissatisfaction among women in the industry, in contrast to the attitudes of men (Liesse, 2013). The survey included nearly 1,000 responses – 55 percent from men and 45 percent from women – with about 70 percent of the respondents working at agencies and 30 percent working for client organizations. Statistically, women represented half of the advertising workforce while men held 68 percent of the management jobs. Interestingly, 75 percent of the women believed that gender issues were a problem in the industry, and analysis suggested that the relative paucity of women in top executive positions was obscured by the overall high participation rate of women in advertising jobs. Heide Gardner, Senior Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion for the Interpublic Group, noted that men may not view gender parity as an issue in advertising, explaining (Liesse, 2013, p. 10):
Concerns about diversity in advertising careers are not limited to the United States. Research by Arnberg and Svanlund (2016), Davis (2015), Knight (2013), and the United Kingdom’s Institute of Advertising Practitioners (Hall, 2011) reveals low employment levels and/or restrictions in professional roles among women and people of color in Europe and South Africa, suggesting that the problem is a widespread and vexing global issue. Taken together, the background on people of color and women in advertising suggest that opportunities for high-level positions in the industry for black women have been and remain extremely rare.
