Free the Work, the groundbreaking organization designed to open up opportunities for a more diverse talent base in filmmaking, TV, commercials and other forms of content, has conducted an in-depth analysis of production house rosters and found a profound lack of Black directors in the advertising industry.
Free the Work’s research has revealed that of the 1,200-plus directors in the lineups of 60 leading U.S. production companies, only 4 percent are Black. Thirty-four of those production houses have no Black directors whatsoever.
Meanwhile in the U.K., an analysis of 45 production companies found that 23 of them have no Black helmers. And those 45 U.K. shops listed a total of 1,075 directors on their rosters–only three percent of those filmmakers are Black.
Furthermore, five of the eight most award production companies at the 2019 AICP Show had no Black directors.
In an Instagram post, Free the Work released a statement which read, “Our goal was to shed light on a problem that’s upheld throughout multiple levels of the industry–these numbers at the production company level speak to issues within the brand and agency spheres, as well. If so few production companies are willing to invest in Black talent, this surely reflects a major problem in the supply chain, with reverberations throughout the entire advertising production ecosystem. By publishing our findings, we hope that this becomes a time of reckoning and fresh commitment from production companies on an internal level.”
Free the Work was founded in 2019 by director Alma Har’el who is on the commercialmaking roster of Epoch Films, and earlier this year won the DGA Award for Outstanding Achievement of a First Time Feature Film Director on the strength of Honey Boy. Free the Work evolved as an expansion of Free the Bid, a Har’el-initiated program formed in 2016 that has successfully prompted many brands and their agencies to include at least one woman among the three directors bidding for every commercial job.
Free the Work’s research on Black directors was undertaken in support of Black Lives Matter as well as Nathan Young and Bennett D. Bennett’s 600&Rising–Call for Change letter (click here). Young, who's group strategy director at ad agency Periscope, and Bennett, a principal at Aerialist, are co-organizers of a collective of more than 600 Black advertising professionals calling for the release of diversity data at agencies and the adoption of policy reform making the voices of people of color a more representative part of the creative process. There is currently no industry data on how many Black men, Black women, or other people of color work in advertising agencies. Without this data, it is impossible to track progress or measure the effectiveness of agency diversity and inclusion efforts.
Young and Bennett’s letter proposes 12 steps to bring about meaningful change:
- Make a specific, measurable, and public commitment to improve Black representation at all levels of agency staffing, especially Senior and Leadership positions
- Track and publicly report workforce diversity data on an annual basis to create accountability for the agency and the industry
- Audit agency policies and culture to ensure the environment we work in is more equitable and inclusive to a diversity of backgrounds and perspectives
- Provide extensive bias training to HR employees and all levels of management
- Extend agency outreach to a more diverse representation of colleges, universities, and art schools
- Expand residencies and internship programs to candidates with transferable skills who may not have taken a traditional educational path toward advertising
- Create, fund, and support Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) for Black employees
- Invest in management and leadership training, as well as mentorship, sponsorship, and other career development programs for Black employees
- Require all leadership to be active participants in company Diversity & Inclusion initiatives and tie success in those initiatives to bonus compensation.
- Create a Diversity & Inclusion committee made up of Black and NBPOC employees to help shape diversity & inclusion policy and monitor its progress
- Establish a diversity review panel to stem the spread of stereotypes in creative work and ensure offensive or culturally insensitive work is never published
- And introduce a wage equity plan to ensure that Black women, Black men and people of color are being compensated fairly.
