How can we approach the Hope Gap in marketing and advertising?

The Hope Gap is a collaborative paper written by The Unmistakables, business leaders, and ED&I practitioners across sectors to address the gap between the promise of social acceptance we know is possible, and the reality of what we are experiencing in our lifetimes.

The report focuses on three critical sectors that shape the societal norms, values, and narratives that influence our expectations and desires for the future. These are business at large, marketing and advertising, and the media. 

Below is an excerpt from our chapter on the marketing and advertising industry. You can download the full report here

Imagine you’ve landed your dream first job as an assistant brand manager for a well-known brand. As part of your induction process, you’re introduced to the agencies who work on the brand. All the agencies have a team of people with varied backgrounds, cultures and perspectives. Sitting in meetings with them, you see them challenge each other’s ideas constructively and with grace. The campaigns they create are fresh, innovative and authentic. They’re seeking the right input at the right time from the people and communities they don’t have in the room or fully understand because they’re committed to getting campaigns right. 

You meet with the Brand Director who lays out their expectations of you. They want you to embrace inclusivity at every level, from concept development to execution, so that you are directing agencies to deliver campaigns that connect deeply with audiences and drive brand loyalty. 

You begin to work with your team and agencies and really hone in on what is being asked of you. You see your friends loving the brand partnerships and social content, organically sharing posts on social media. You feel proud that you work for a brand that focuses on authentic representation of different cultures, genders, abilities and identities. Not to shock or be woke. But just because you recognise that people aren’t all the same. 

Just how far away are we from this world? 

It is no secret that the marketing industry has always played an influential role in creating, shaping and reinforcing societal norms on everything from what defines ‘beauty’ through to gender roles and expectations in the home. As shifting national demographics, globalisation, and the digital marketplace evolve, the industry has had to adapt to meet shifting consumer needs and expectations. This includes everything from the visual diversity of families through to the norms portrayed around who cooks dinner and cleans the home.

In particular, these changing global dynamics–including but not limited to people living longer and the next generations entering the workplace– raise questions about how the industry is going to intentionally and deliberately evolve to attract and retain the right talent. And by ‘right talent,’ we mean the talent needed to deliver campaigns and activations that resonate with the aforementioned evolving audience needs. 

Let’s begin by looking at the ‘state of play’ over the past couple of decades - going back to the late 90s when I first

entered the world of marcomms, agency side, through to 2020 when I left an in-house Head of Communications role. Throughout that time, the agency teams I worked for and with were almost entirely homogeneous, as were the assistant brand managers/ brand managers/ brand directors and CMOs client-side in marketing roles. 

In my personal experience, ‘successful’ teams and certainly the big wigs tended to be White, well-educated men, with a sprinkling of well-groomed “ball-breaking” (whatever that means) yet ultimately compliant women. I certainly noticed a lot of pinkie rings and Oxbridge types in all-agency meetings back in the early 2000s. 

Stereotypical? Probably. 

True? Almost certainly. 

Indeed, 25+ years on from my first forays in agency-land, the IPA’s All In Census (2023) demonstrates that the working class are significantly underrepresented (20% vs 40% general population) and the percentage of people in the industry who attended a fee-paying school is 19% vs 8% of the general population. ONS data shows that young people from socioeconomically privileged backgrounds are five times more likely to make it in the creative industries than their less privileged counterparts. 

For me, there seemed to be unwritten rules that I just didn’t understand, despite a private education (coupled with socialising with friends from higher socio-economic backgrounds). Because that’s the thing: there are some things that money just can’t buy, true acceptance being one of them. Your name’s either on the door, or it's not. 

In the work we do with agency and brand team partners, we’re hearing that although there’s a ‘will’ to diversify teams, the ‘way’ has yet to be found. Countless schemes hunting for ‘young Black talent’ or prioritising searches for ‘diverse’ (read: non-White) candidates were put into place after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The unifying experience was that agency-land wanted ‘different’ people - maybe for optics, maybe because the client told them to, maybe because they believed diversity of thought would lead to better outputs. But once they had people who were ‘culture adds’ vs ‘culture fits’ (or in other words, people who added something new to the company culture vs people who shared the same behaviours and interests as the existing workforce), they had no idea what to do with them. 

And this is where we’re seeing the very real impact of the lack of diversity in creative output. Take the recent Bella Hadid x Adidas campaign as a great example of the impact a lack of diversity behind the camera has. The campaign focused on the retro SL72 trainers, originally released for the 1972 Munich Olympics. The campaign aimed to revive the classic sneaker while leveraging Hadid's influential status in the fashion world. However, the campaign faced backlash due to Hadid’s involvement, with the American Jewish Committee criticising Adidas for picking what they called a “vocal anti-Israel model”, suggesting that Hadid's involvement was inflammatory and linked to antisemitic sentiments. In response, Adidas issued an apology, acknowledging that the campaign unintentionally connected to the tragic events of the Munich Olympics. This chain of events fell foul of a few key factors: 

• the historical context: the Munich Olympics were marred by an attack where Israeli athletes were taken hostage by the Black September Organisation, a Palestinian militant group, and,

• political sensitivities: Hadid, an American model of Palestinian heritage, has been vocal in her support for Palestine and critical of Israel. Her involvement in the campaign led to accusations that Adidas was conflating Palestinian identity with terrorism, especially given the historical context of the SL72 trainers.

This particular campaign highlights the need for both diversity of thought in teams as well as more thoughtfully inclusive processes so that historical and political sensitivities are duly considered.

Marketing, of course, by its very nature is built on hope. So how do we close the Hope Gap in this glorious industry full of so much zest, creativity and noble ambitions? And how do we actively leverage the power of this industry to drive social progress? 

You can download the full report, which includes co-created solutions with ED&I practitioners across industries, here.