"Minority Report"

Brandweek

December 1, 2008

By Andrew Adam Newman, Adweek

 

For more than four decades, civil rights groups have accused the ad business of violating equal-opportunity hiring laws. In 2006, the New York City Commission on Human Rights, acting on a complaint from Sanford Moore, an African American who had worked at agencies including BBDO, launched an investigation of 16 prominent New York firms, including BBDO, DDB, Ogilvy & Mather, Saatchi & Saatchi and Young & Rubicam. The agencies settled with the commission, committiing to increase diversity over three years.

In the wake of that settlement, some agencies have increased the number of minorities working in their shops.

Yet, the data suggest that some shops have merely donned a fig leaf -- offering bromides about how their hiring process is "colorblind," doing pro bono work for minority causes, but still hiring only those who look like them.

Soon, those shops could be in for a day of reckoning, as Cyrus Mehri, the civil rights lawyer behind several landmark racial discrimination suits is now targeting the advertising business.

Mehri says he has been contacted by "people from inside the industry who have suffered discrimination" and that his firm will soon issue a report on African Americans in advertising. The report will benchmark advertising against 28 other "persuasion" industries.

Among the findings in a preliminary report obtained by Adweek: African Americans make up only 3.2 percent of advertising's upper management in the U.S., well under half of the average of 7.2 percent in similar professions.