Press

Richard Whitman. April 28, 2023

For its efforts to advance inclusion in the advertising and marketing industry the Association of National Advertisers received a World Federation of Advertisers Presidents Award at the WFA’s Global Marketer Week event in Istanbul.

The WFA noted that various ANA divisions and working groups – the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF), SeeHer, the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing (AIMM) and ANA Engage Responsibly – came together to provide new tools and resources in support of the common goal to enhance inclusion.

Each ANA group caters to different audiences but together they boost the overall DEI strategy of making the marketing and advertising industry more diverse and inclusive, the WFA stated.

Presidents Awards were also bestowed on associations from Brazil, France, Norway and UK for outstanding marketing leadership. Brazil’s ABA and the Brazilian Licensing Association were recognized for a campaign promoting responsible advertising.

Union des marques, France was recognized for its “Start-up Your Brand” initiative, designed to help advertisers source innovative new solutions and help start-ups pitch themselves and gain visibility.

ANFO Norway was recognized for awards programs designed to celebrate and improve best practices in marketing and advertising excellence.

And ISBA UK was lauded for a $20 million-plus cross-media measurement initiative called Origin. It’s an effort to create an industry-owned entity that provides the media sector with a new and independent multi-channel cross-media measurement system.

Alabama State University
By Kenneth Mullinax. Fall 2022

An exciting live virtual conference will be hosted by Alabama State University on Oct. 6. The conference will feature marketing industry experts who will share information about how best to embrace marketing and public relations opportunities, and how to create and drive a positive message within the new standards that now exist due to changes brought about by the COVID pandemic and social justice movements.

The conference is titled “How Purposeful Brands Affect Society.” It will take place on Oct. 6, from 11 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. with ASU faculty members Dr. L. Simone Byrd, professor of Public Relations and a Fulbright Scholar, and Professor Kim Smith, instructor of Management (Percy J. Vaughn, Jr. College of Business Administration) hosting the event. The event is in collaboration with integrated marketing communication executives from Abbott Laboratories, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF).

“The purpose of this conference and its goal is all about diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that should be brought to the forefront of marketing. We are extending the classroom and course content by connecting the ASU community through this live virtual conference with nationally renowned marketing, public relations and advertising executives so as to bridge the gap between the academy and professional practice,” said Dr. Byrd.

Byrd explained that collaborating with a multinational corporation like Abbott Laboratories provides significant cutting-edge knowledge, generates financial support to engage and participate in ANA-based training events, and allows the hosting of webinars, which are important for enhancing scholarly knowledge for the University’s students and other members of the Hornet Nation family.

THE CONFERENCE POSITIVELY IMPACTS ASU

Professor Smith believes that with Abbot and ANA’s support, the conference and collaboration will positively impact the University by enhancing the faculty’s insight about cutting-edge marketing trends, by facilitating ASU’s participation in research opportunities, and promoting listening sessions with Fortune 500 CEOs and Chief Marketing Officers in executive-style boot camps with ASU family members.

“The training enhances our knowledge, thereby allowing us to update Alabama State curriculum and prepare students more effectively,” Smith stated. “This will allow students and others to learn from executives from Abbott, Citi, Meta, and McDonald’s, some of whom are HBCU graduates. They will also see that achieving a ‘high hanging’ fruit position is possible and hopefully will aspire to work for these companies and be motivated to do the groundwork to get there.”

Smith stated that the conference has been in development for some time and is part of an ongoing collaboration that includes reaching across the academic “discipline aisle” for a greater depth of knowledge to be gained by a multifaceted approach.

FACILITATING FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES TO BENEFIT STUDENTS

Byrd expanded on the premise of the event.

“Both Professor Smith and I will continue to keep the lines of communication open to facilitate future opportunities so we may advocate for our students. An event such as this allows students an opportunity to engage in a deeper exploration into the day-to-day function of the corporate marketing, public relations and advertising professions in a manner that extends their learning and professional development beyond the classroom. Programs such as these also open the door to potential career networking engagement with executives.”

Rutgers Business Review
Erich Toncre. Spring 2022

Abstract
I discussed the current state and outlook of marketing with Gord McLean, President and CEO of ANA Educational Foundation. He shares his insights about the misconceptions surrounding marketing, key takeaways for marketers from the pandemic and striking the right balance between the qualitative and quantitative sides of marketing. He also stressed that the profession needs to do a better job of ‘marketing’ marketing to students and the greater use of AI and other technologies does not mean the end of traditional marketing.

What is AEF and what is its mission?

We are the Association of National Advertisers Educational Foundation and our mission is to serve as the bridge between the marketing industry and academia. Everything that we do is about connecting marketers and agencies with universities, professors, and students.

The AEF has two key areas of focus. The first one is developing and nurturing the next generation of marketing and advertising leaders. We have a substantial marketing and advertising internship program where we placed over eighty students last year, and we have a campus speaker program where we send hundreds of practitioners to campuses to familiarize students with the current practice of marketing. The second area is about advancing marketing education and curriculum. We have a Visiting Professor Program where we provide a weeklong immersion on the growth areas of marketing such as technology and data, society and sustainability and more traditional areas such as brand management. We also have an academic journal that focuses more on the softer side of marketing. It is called Advertising and Society Quarterly and is published in cooperation with Duke University. We also have marketing education certificate programs for students offered through the AEF.

What are the biggest misconceptions concerning marketing and how does AEF address them?

I think the first and most disturbing is when students try to define marketing. They believe that it is mostly about ‘advertising and selling stuff’. As you know we are much more than that. We need to be a force for good in society as well as a force for growth in business. The second misconception is the question of what constitutes a career in marketing. We have not done a very good job of charting career paths for entry level marketers. If you think about what marketers do today, and how they progress through the industry, there is no straight line. I had a conversation just a couple of weeks ago with the CMO of a major retailer. He told me that he has over forty roles and job descriptions just within the purview of the CMO and the marketing organization of the company. There is a wealth of different routes to enter the industry, and we need to recognize that today’s talent comes from everywhere. We need to do a better job creating this awareness.

With the greater emphasis and usage of A.I. by many firms, there is a concern that many marketing roles and jobs will become obsolete. Is it premature to say that traditional marketing is dead? Why or why not?

It is fair to say that for every job that is replaced by AI, another one will be created. We need to be thinking about a whole new way of looking at skill sets. That is why the industry needs to partner with universities. The most important area of growth and development is in data and analytics. The universities do a great job of equipping students with the requisite skills in those areas, but that is just the starting point for student preparation. The question is: how do we take data and analytics and turn it into actual insights that lead to action? Students also need to be equipped to create a narrative or build a story rooted in that data which is the essence of brand building. AI will come and then there will be the next iteration of AI, but critical thinking and the human factor will endure.

You may think that traditional marketing is dead and we may joke about the fact the 4P’s or 5P’s are artifacts of history. However, I see a bright future for marketing which combines both the qualitative and quantitative disciplines together with the classic discipline of brand building

As we are making our way out of the pandemic, what are the key takeaways for marketers?

The pandemic was transformational to marketing in at least four ways. One, remote work has changed the workplace forever. Even as companies look to return to the office, younger employees are comfortable working remotely and really look for the flexibility. And whether companies like it or not, they are going to have to adjust to this expectation.

Two, the rise of the attention economy. Think of the ascendance of TikTok and its community of influencers just over the last 24 months. Its not’s just a social force, but now a very powerful marketing and advertising vehicle. It is incredible what they have done in so short a time, and they are not alone.

Three, the shift to e commerce and direct to consumer. It was well underway prior to the pandemic, but now it has accelerated four or five-fold. And finally, the pandemic confirmed brands must put purpose at the center of their business. Young marketers are not just looking for jobs, they are looking for meaningful careers. And if brands are not genuinely authentic to their purpose, they will lose not just employees but Gen Z customers. There was a time not all that long ago marketers thought they owned their brands. The pandemic showed us that customers are in charge – as irrational and unpredictable as they may be!

What advice would you give to marketing students regarding skills that they need today and in the future?

Of course, hard skills are critically important. But in addition to building hard skills, you should cultivate the softer skills. Your future employers prize curiosity, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence. If you can combine them, you’ve got a big career ahead of you. Marketers are really looking for fully formed marketers who can balance the qualitative and the quantitative sides of the equation. That is absolutely critical. A path to the most senior roles in marketing is no longer possible without it. That is why the AEF is focused on creating partnerships between marketers and educators. We want to help strike that balance.

Is there a risk that the quantitative side of marketing will win over the qualitative side of marketing?

Okay, here is where I get controversial. There has been a stampede to performance marketing and a hyper fascination with measurement, but none of that succeeds without brilliant storytelling. Within marketing, the pendulum swung too far to the quantitative side. We must get the pendulum back in the center again. The way to do that is to bring the best of both worlds together and ensuring we have a diversity of thought. Somebody recently said that nobody builds brands anymore. I do not agree. As long as human beings are relational in nature and want to connect with each other, the storytelling side of marketing will never be obsolete. The AEF is building a campaign that focuses on ‘marketing marketing’ to students. Which is ironic because we are supposed to be the marketers! We are marketing the profession in a way that showcases the best of the quantitative and the qualitative sides, and that positions marketing as a truly meaningful career. As we say, a force for growth and a force for good.

What is your biggest barrier to attracting students to marketing?

There is low awareness of how creative and exciting jobs in marketing can be, and how those jobs can lead to a fulfilling career. In other disciplines, career paths are clear. In marketing, not so much. In my experience, I have found that students who are drawn to marketing exhibit curiosity and critical thinking that often translates into more resourcefulness and an inherent desire to find their own way. But I think what we need to do is to make it easier for them. Secondly, we need to get marketers on campus more, more engaged, so that they are either in the classroom or professors are coming to their companies. The interaction between marketer and professor is pure gold because it translates into such a better educational experience for students. The other important piece is around curriculum, and that’s where practitioners can also help supplement with some of the more future focused and societal aspects of modern marketing. We need to come together to better prepare our future leaders of marketing.

Thank you for making the time to talk to Rutgers Business Review.

ANA Magazine
Chuck Kapelke. November 19, 2021

Amid the swirl of change CMOs and marketers now face, one of the toughest is how to attract and retain the kind of talent that will help brands thrive in a post-digital age. With apologies to Jaws’ Chief Martin Brody, marketers are going to need a bigger boat.

According to a recent survey by Working Not Working Magazine, 50 percent of advertising creative professionals are thinking about switching career tracks. The survey, based on the responses from 850 executives, also found that more than a quarter of the respondents are dissatisfied with their work. The situation is acute, as people have gotten conditioned to working from home, and are now using that as leverage. “Agencies that are saying you have to come back to work in person are losing employees,” says Ann Willets, founder of GB Executive Recruiting, which specializes in the PR and marketing industries. “Those are the people I’m scooping up and placing somewhere else. It’s a big migration. It’s completely changing the industry. And the old guard who don’t get it are going to lose out.”

Part of the challenge may be generational: millennials and gen Zers are more likely than their older counterparts to walk away, according to an Amdocs survey of 1,000 full-time workers.

But industry observers say they’re seeing people of all ages cut ties. “We’ve seen people leaving just because they want to do something different,” says Lori Almeida, global chief talent officer at ANA member Siegel+Gale. “It’s been an intense year and a half, and people are trying to break out of the day-in, day-out rigor we’ve had to deal with.”

To push back against the tide of the “Great Resignation,” agencies and brand-side marketers need to focus on building a people-first workplace.

“Marketing is changing, and work-life is changing,” says Bradley Johnson, director of data analytics at Ad Age, who oversees the annual Ad Age Best Places to Work ranking. “If you are going to embrace the future, the last thing you should do is go back to business as usual. It’s not about returning to the way we used to work. To attract workers, you need a winning workplace.”

Give a Little, Get a Little
Burnout is a big factor in ad creatives’ unhappiness, according to the Working Not Working survey, with about 41 percent of the respondents saying they feel burned out every so often, 27 percent feel it consistently, and 20 percent are “extremely burnt out.” The most common reasons cited: long hours (51 percent), lost motivation (48 percent), and how they are treated or valued (37 percent).

Burnout can be avoided by setting clear expectations and permitting for a high level of personal freedom. Cargo, a marketing agency and ANA member based in Greenville, S.C., for instance, doesn’t allow employees to work from home full-time, but they offer a lot of flexibility.

“When we go to recruit and look for talent, we are asking for butts in seats,” says Rocky French, creative lead at Cargo. “We are seeing some walkaways and not as many hand-raisers, but we’ve nearly doubled our headcount since January. Our policy is, if you need to work remotely for a month because you have something going on in another city, no problem, we can do it.”

Cargo’s offices are chock-full of perks designed to make people feel at home, including a ping-pong table, an arcade with gaming consoles, and a full bar. The firm also offers “Summer Fridays,” when everyone takes off at noon the last day of the workweek. But the secret sauce, French says, is a culture built on treating people like human beings. “We’re able to sell an environment of collaboration and humanity and just caring about one another,” he says.

Key takeaway: Agencies and brands need to reassure current and prospective employees that their time is valued — inside and outside of the workplace. “To hire good people, we have to be flexible in our approach,” Almeida says. “A lot of the changes that resulted from COVID-19 are better for our spirit and our soul.”

Talent Comes from Everywhere
In light of dramatic changes in the U.S., both culturally and demographically, agencies and brands need to cast a wider net for talent, says Gord McLean, president and CEO of the ANA Educational Foundation, which focuses on recruiting younger people for a career in marketing and advertising. That includes Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Hispanic-serving campuses, lesser-known schools, and companies outside the marketing industry.

“We have to begin to understand that talent comes from everywhere; it doesn’t just come from New York, L.A., Chicago, and major urban centers,” McLean says. “And we can’t just look at communications programs. We need more liberal arts and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students.”

Brands and organizations should also look to streamline the hiring process to make it easy for new hires to come aboard. “You’ve got to be more flexible, or the role will sit open,” Willets says. “If you’re waiting for a unicorn, you put stress on your existing team, and then they start leaving. And you have to be faster and nimble in how you interview. Candidates are tired of jumping through hoops.”

Key takeaway: Hiring and onboarding are key to long-term retention, but these steps are too often overlooked by business managers. Career pathways, diversity networks, and mentorship are essential for helping entry-level employees to feel at home. “People often call me and say, ‘They threw me into the deep end,'” Willets says. “You need to give the candidate a sense that you are going to bring them in and nurture them and make sure they have a comfortable transition into your organization.”

Treat Candidates Like a Client
Competitive pay and a handsome benefits package also play a huge role in attracting candidates who may be drawn to other business sectors. However, creative services agencies need to do for themselves what they are often called upon to do for their clients: provide candidates with a convincing argument to work together centered around a strong sense of purpose.

“Core employee benefits are really entry points,” Johnson says. “Companies that consistently do well in our surveys are authentic, and they’re original. They are true to their brand, with a strong brand purpose. They’re not cutting and pasting what competitors do.”

Younger candidates in particular need to be clear on the firm’s raison d’être. “You need to be able to articulate your mission, why you exist,” McLean says. “The young talent in their early career stages, they are not just looking for a job, they want a meaningful career that can play a positive role in society.”

Key takeaway: Building a workplace with low turnover and high engagement is not impossible, but it takes creativity and investment of both time and resources. “Employees want support, encouragement, empowerment, and purpose,” Johnson says. “If you can focus on those attributes, you’re going to have an advantage in attracting the talent you need to win.”

September 20, 2021

White, non-Hispanic executives feel more included in their companies’ business decision-making process than ethnic minority managers, according to a new study by the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF).

The study, “My Voice Matters: Linking Inclusion to Business Growth,” investigated levels of inclusion when making business decisions, determining career progression and growth, and evaluating a sense of belonging within the industry. The report queried respondents in three key areas linked to business performance: My Voice in the Room, My Voice in the Company, and My Voice in the Industry.

In terms of race and ethnicity, survey respondents were divided into two groups: White Non-Hispanic and Ethnic Minority. Across all dimensions, Ethnic Minority respondents indicated they did not feel included in the corporate decision-making process as much as their White Non-Hispanic counterparts. In many instances, the gap was statistically significant.

For example, 49 percent of White Non-Hispanic respondents said they felt comfortable sharing their perspective when important business decisions were being made in meetings compared to 36 percent of Ethnic Minority respondents. More dramatically, 41 percent of White Non-Hispanic respondents said their manager included their perspective in key decision-making processes compared to 28 percent of Ethnic Minority respondents.

Gender also played a role in corporate decision-making, albeit with minimal statistically significant differences between men’s and women’s levels of inclusion, according to the study. For example, the study revealed that 44 percent of women and 48 percent of men said they felt comfortable sharing their perspective when important business decisions were being made in meetings. Similarly, 36 percent of women and 35 percent of men said they felt their voice was being “heard, respected, and considered when making business decisions in meetings.”

Despite those findings, there were disparities. Forty-three percent of women said they believe they have the same “chance of progressing upward at my company as everyone else at my level,” but only 29 percent of male respondents agreed.

“This important new study brings greater insight and understanding as to how differences in ethnicity, gender, age, status and income affect an individual’s feeling of inclusion,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice. “These findings suggest that organizations must be increasingly focused to evolve human resource strategies to diminish inclusion related differences and optimize overall performance.”

The key goal of the study was to explore how to construct an inclusion framework to measure business results. The AEF embarked on a six-month journey to develop this framework with key stakeholders in the talent ecosystem, such as marketers, researchers, recruiters, DEI executives, ad agencies, and academics.

Additional Findings:

• LGBTQ+ respondents reported a disconnect in being represented in company diversity and inclusion efforts.
• Married people and those living with others said they believe they contribute more significantly to business decisions than those not married or living with others.
• Older respondents (age 55–64) feel their voice is heard in the room, across the company, and in the industry, while people ages 45–54 feel more disenfranchised in their company.
• Regarding salary, those in the highest salary band ($100,000 and up) said their voice in the room, company, and industry has more influence than those in the next salary band down ($75,000–$99,000).
• With tenure, the data shows that when the 18–29 age group is invited into the room, they seem to be comfortable sharing their perspective. However, those in this younger age bracket are not invited as frequently into those discussions.
• Other surveyed groups — military, disability, and brand versus agency — showed minimal statistically significant differences.

The AEF plans to make the study a centerpiece in helping companies benchmark their own inclusion efforts against industry norms. In addition to integrating the study’s findings throughout the ANA, the AEF also plans to work with other industry trade associations such as the 4A’s, the IAB, and the AAF to help elevate the report’s findings.

The AEF collaborated with Morning Consult to develop and administer the study in January 2020; results were available in March 2020. The survey was anonymous, with 268 marketing and advertising professionals responding.

Marc Iskowitz. July 16, 2021

Historically, advertising holding companies have not always maintained the most cordial of relations with each other. They perennially battle for talent and frequently skirmish over client work, both of which have a way of fueling old rivalries and keeping executives at arm’s length.

Yet an initiative involving three of the world’s biggest ad holding companies by revenue belies the tribalism that often characterizes this industry. WPP, Omnicom and Interpublic, along with consumer agencies Doner and Vayner, have joined forces, with the blessing of client Johnson & Johnson. They aim to share successes and failures, pitfalls and opportunities as the healthcare marketing sector strives to increase the diversity of its teams and the inclusion within its walls.

Members of J&J’s agency team who spoke with MM+M said the sector may be playing catch-up when it comes to a comprehensive approach to diversity, equity and inclusion. Partnering represents one way brands and agencies can make up ground.

“We have an incredibly long road ahead of us, but the ideas that come out of the calls with our various HR teams are already part of how we’re going to market, both on a macro basis and locally,” says Stuart Klein, VP and healthcare practice lead at IPG. The willingness to share “is about, ‘How do we inspire each other to do better?’” he adds.
The intel-swapping includes what’s worked (and what hasn’t) with respect to employee resource groups, interview techniques, levels of diversity needed when staffing teams and lists of diverse suppliers. Among agencies, most of whom define themselves by their cultures and talent differences, this kind of information normally would rise to the level of a state secret.

The partners stress that nothing strictly proprietary or even in the incubation stage has been or will be revealed. At the same time, there appears to be an unusual degree of candor in the conversations that have taken place to date.

“That openness around building cultures of inclusivity has been refreshing and valuable, and made us all better more quickly at creating environments where people that come from diverse backgrounds are going to feel more welcome, more heard, more supported and more likely to remain,” says Patrick Wisnom, WPP’s global client lead for J&J.

All three were asked to adopt “micro-charters” that support the company’s DE&I strategic approach, recalls Manoj Raghunandanan, president of the global self care and consumer experience organization at J&J’s consumer health unit. The drugmaker also rallied its global media partners — including monoliths such as Google, Facebook and Amazon — to do the same.

“Successfully changing the marketing industry requires partnership,” Raghunandanan explains. “Now, our procurement team is collaborating closely with our agency partners and meeting regularly to make near real-time adjustments.”

For his part, Klein is impressed by the camaraderie. “We have become a kind of macro holding company as it relates to achieving these initiatives,” he says. “I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years. I have never seen anything even close to this in terms of holding company collaboration.”

Considering the current state of DE&I in the industry, efforts to improve it will take nothing less than an unprecedented level of cooperation. The C-suites at WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis and Dentsu were between 82% and 85% white, according to a 2020 report from the Association of National Advertisers. The ANA also found that only 3% of 870 chief marketing officers were Black, 5% were Asian and 4% were Hispanic.

The tragic killing of George Floyd in May 2020, along with the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on mortality in communities of color, put greater focus on the need to improve DE&I in the workplace. Many agencies and advertisers pledged to up diverse representation, particularly in the C-suite.

Last June, 600 Black advertising professionals issued an ultimatum to the predominantly white industry, in a “call for change” letter that called for more Black hiring at the top. While momentum seemed to be mounting in the 13 months that have followed, the reality is that progress has been painfully slow.

“We’ve seen a handful of hires, which I’m excited about, but truth be told we’ve not seen much change,” says Walter Geer, executive creative director at the WPP agency VMLY&R, and one of a handful of Black agency creative leaders. “And that’s simply because the conversation has died out. People have short-term memories. The longer you wait, eventually people forget.”

Geer has spent much of the past year reviving discussion by engaging agency bosses in dialogue about the lack of opportunity for Black and brown people. Gary Vaynerchuk, for instance, told Geer he intended to add two diverse hires to his senior leadership team by Q1 of this year. After that deadline came and went, Geer took to social media to hold him to his pledge; Vaynerchuk soon made good on his promise, hiring three diverse leaders.

Shareholders similarly want to hold companies accountable for racial pledges they made in the wake of Floyd’s death and the #BlackLivesMatter protests that followed, not to mention the mountain of academic research showing that diversity adds value. To that point, J&J is among the large U.S. corporations that investors would like to see conduct a racial equity audit and issue annual diversity reports. After shareholders filed a proposal for the company to take such action, the drugmaker claimed that it is already taking steps to address racial justice and asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to block the votes.

Others agree that diversity numbers don’t tell the whole story. James Kinney, global chief DE&I officer and chief people officer for North America at Ogilvy, also part of WPP, says he prefers to focus on percentage improvement rather than straight percentages, since attrition is part of the ad business. A 20-year veteran who has helped other companies upgrade their diversity practices, Kinney’s advice is to eschew specific targets.
“I don’t want anyone to feel like they were part of a goal,” he explains. “What I do want is an incredible global culture where everyone feels like they belong.”

Indeed, it’s hard to quantify the opportunity for cultural transformation that now lies at the industry’s doorstep. “We see this more as inclusion, belonging and enhancing everyone’s experience,” Kinney adds.

Since his arrival, Ogilvy has gone from having eight to nearly 20 employee resource groups. The professional networks, Kinney believes, help ensure that “there’s a place for everyone to have what we would call hyperlocal or hyperculture within the agency.”
Diversity data are largely just numbers on a page, anyway. If a person of color walks into a room or joins a Zoom call with people they work with, they’ll immediately feel whether their organization is a culturally diverse one or not.

Eric Jones, a producer/editor at Omnicom’s Snow Companies, says he’s encouraged by the greater attention his agency is paying to DE&I. “But hiring people of color is just a first step,” he cautions. “The hard part becomes, ‘What is the workspace like?’ Once we start integrating the workplace more, are companies prepared to accommodate people of color?”

Asked for examples of concrete progress, Charles Dixon, a creative director at Evoke, cites the firm’s internship program, which is more than 50% diverse. But what he finds more interesting is that potential job candidates are explicitly asking about the company’s DE&I efforts during interviews.

“It’s no longer just your standard, ‘What’s the salary and benefits package?’ It’s, ‘What is your company doing to support diversity?’” Dixon notes. “To me, that’s one of the biggest signs of progress: When diversity becomes more than just a talking point but a tangible benefit, like 401(k) and personal time off. And candidates expect companies to have tangible examples of it. If not, we’re the ones missing out on that talent.”
Still, others are disheartened that many of the recent strides have manifested themselves at the junior level. Such staffers need to feel supported so they feel comfortable speaking up and bringing their authentic selves to work, says Angela Williams, a copy supervisor at IPG’s Area 23.

“Without a balance of power at the senior levels, you don’t have that environment. People don’t feel confident telling the truth or presenting an idea because the person to whom they’re presenting doesn’t have the context to interpret it,” Williams explains, adding that a diversity shortfall in the leadership ranks influences the type of work that agencies do and the type of talent they attract.

Entry-level recruiting and hiring is clearly important. But without progress at both ends of the career ladder, the conditions won’t be ripe for non-white people to progress.
The data bear that out. Research among the Black workforce, for instance, shows that Black leaders are more likely than white ones to leave their organizations. Other studies point to Black workers feeling less supported, engaged with and committed to their jobs than their non-Black peers.

“I can’t stress the importance of this enough: When you don’t see someone who looks like you who’s more senior, you eventually leave,” Geer says.

Progress is also slow in hiring people from outside the industry. Most higher roles, such as EVP and SVP, continue to be filled through preexisting relationships, Geer observes. To start attracting diverse talent for more senior positions, health agencies need to understand that not all people need to come from the same types of companies.

“We do a bad job of finding talent because we have this feeling that only agency people can work at an agency, and only people who’ve done HCP can work on HCP,” Geer continues. “That’s not the case at all.”

The J&J partnership, which grew out of the drugmaker’s earlier DE&I commitments, seeks to improve on that situation. The company wanted to take a more public stance.
First came a $10 million, three-year commitment to fighting racism and injustice that CEO Alex Gorsky announced in a letter to employees in June 2020. Then came November’s DE&I initiative, entailing a five-year, $100 million pledge to fight health inequities for Black people and other communities of color in the U.S. One industry pundit characterized it as “the most comprehensive [DE&I] commitment to date that has been announced within the pharmaceutical industry.”

Beyond vowing to increase Black representation in its upper echelons, the three-pronged plan included providing equitable care for underserved communities, initiatives to increase diversity in clinical trials and forge stronger partnerships with health systems, and pledges to support Black- and Hispanic-owned businesses. The drugmaker’s consumer unit also signed onto the ANA Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing pledge, the signatories of which promised to hold themselves accountable to a number of practices aimed at elevating multicultural marketing.

Clients want a workforce of writers, directors and photographers that mirrors the diversity of their customer base. “What [clients] get is better work, because we will have better teams as a result of having more diversity,” Wisnom says. The unified approach is also more efficient than asking individual agencies to share diversity plans.
Another goal involves increasing the pool of diverse candidates being interviewed, according to WPP VP and commercial director Lisa Berotti.“How do we go to market for HBCUs [historically Black colleges and universities] that we haven’t been able to reach before? How do we partner externally with groups such as the AEF [the ANA Educational Foundation] to connect with those campuses?” she asks. “We’ve been able to bring subjects like that forward. And instead of each agency holding company recreating the wheel, we leverage past experience to propel each other forward.”

Just as importantly, the companies are sharing information to ensure that, as more people of color join the business, they feel comfortable, see paths for growth and future success, and connect with role models and mentors.It didn’t take much convincing for the major agencies to move from warring factions (“we’ve been in rooms together before, and there are always walls,” Wisnom says) to DE&I teammates. In fact, it took one phone call to each of the holding company leads, and that was that. “There was no secret to it,” Wisnom recalls. “We basically invited everyone to a discussion: ‘This is what we’re trying to do.’” Klein says he was most inspired by the potential to “cross-pollinate” learnings that arose from the group sessions among other agencies and client teams.

J&J Consumer Health chief procurement officer William Gunn says the drugmaker is sharing its framework with other companies to reference as they look to establish similar programs that drive change. The drugmaker also encouraged the agency holding companies to share the framework with other clients as needed.

The agency team knows that its DE&I efforts ultimately will be measured by hard metrics — specifically, the workforce diversity data which, across the ad industry, is woefully low at present. But even if it fails to achieve its aggressive goals, the collaborative effort can still make a difference.

“We’re at the beginning of the journey. And right now, what we’re focused on is the intent and the commitment to making a difference,” Wisnom says.
Meanwhile, Geer laments that the industry is not seeing a real influx of people of color. Rather, it’s merely trading the same small handful of folks from one agency to the next.
He adds that this is going to become even more of a problem. With most agencies making plans for a September return to the office, many are weighing whether their employees need to come in or if they can work permanently from home. As that situation shakes out, Geer anticipates a huge play for talent, which may serve to exacerbate the dearth of diversity in the space.

“By the end of this summer, we are going to see a mass exodus — of all talent,” he predicts. “When [holding companies] report on their diversity numbers in January, many may see a significant decline if they don’t figure out what to do now.”

His recommendation? Identify the POC talent that’s already in-house, and promote those individuals and/or pay them fairly. “If you want talent there, you have to figure out how to make them happy,” Geer says. Otherwise, come early 2022, “Diversity numbers may end up in poorer shape, and the blame will shift to back-to-the-office instead of ensuring that you’re keeping the talent there and doing what’s best for them to want to be there.”
When it comes to diversity, the long game is just as important. Dixon draws inspiration from his father, who broke into graphic design in the publishing industry more than 50 years ago. “As a young, African-American male, he was overwhelmingly the minority,” Dixon recalls.

Although his dad’s DE&I experience was vastly different, Dixon says, it nevertheless offers perspective.

“We have come a way. And for better or for worse, we live in a world where companies are functioning as extensions of people,” he notes. “We need to keep pushing for more from each other, because I don’t think the job’s ever truly going to be finished.”

TecHR News Desk, October 2, 2020

The ANA Educational Foundation (AEF) has announced a series of events, activations and commitments to advance its mission of making the advertising and marketing industries more diverse and inclusive.

The AEF will present a high-profile panel at Advertising Week 2020 to directly tackle the central issue of why the advertising industry has largely failed in its mission to attract a critical mass of diverse talent.

The panel, “The Talent Disconnect: Are We Losing The Battle to Attract The Best and Most Diverse Talent to Our Industry?”, is scheduled for October 5, 11:30am-12:00pm EST during Advertising Week 2020, a now-virtual event that has been reimagined for a global audience.

This keynote event is just one piece of the AEF’s aggressive agenda to help rebalance the advertising and marketing industry. “This year was a time of dramatic transformation for the ANA Educational Foundation, and its work has never been more important,” says Gordon McLean, President & Chief Executive Officer, the ANA Educational Foundation.

“Covid-19 completely disrupted university campuses, as professors struggled to adapt to online teaching and students had their career plans entirely upended. The subsequent economic collapse has forced the industry to pull back from its broader entry level recruitment efforts, but the reckoning around racial equality has catapulted diverse hiring and talent development to the top of every marketer’s priority list,” McLean added.

The AEF recently named Chris Macdonald, Global President For Advertising & Allied Agencies, McCann Worldgroup, as its new Chair. “We’re glad to have Chris on board as our chair, and to have McCann Worldgroup as one of our agency partners helping us to realize the urgency of our mission to rebalance the industry,” McLean says.

Macdonald will moderate the AdWeek 2020 panel, which is comprised of a group of diversity advocates, including: Elizabeth Rutledge, Chief Marketing Officer, American Express; Vijay Viswanathan, Associate Dean of IMC and Associate Professor, Medill School, Northwestern University in Chicago; and Symirah Graham, a student in the Strategic Management Communications program at Howard University.

Macdonald said of his appointment, “The AEF really is the bridge that connects agencies and marketers to academia and is uniquely positioned to help us attract the best and most diverse talent to our industry. I believe passionately in this mission and am delighted to take the chair at such a critical time.”

The AEF agenda for 2021, McLean says, includes achieving more scale for all of the AEF’s talent and education programs by leveraging new virtual capabilities while advancing the ANA CMO Global Growth Council’s talent priorities by better connecting the industry to academia and achieving true diversity through the marketing talent ecosystem.

The AEF also plans to expand its Marketing and Advertising Education (MADE) internship program, grow the Campus Speakers Program, expand its virtual Visiting Professor Program, convene six Conferences on Campus, and increase online momentum with its Advertising & Society Quarterly academic journal.

The “Talent Disconnect” panel at Advertising Week 2020 will dig deeper than the disappointing numbers for diversity representation to examine the academic, cultural, agency and corporate environments that contribute to the lack of diverse representation in the advertising ecosystem.

Examples of issues that the panel may examine include: Why don’t students who are BIPOC see the advertising industry as an interesting or attractive career path? Do ad agencies and clients know how to work with colleges and universities to explain the real-world dynamics of the industry? How do agencies and clients present a picture of “a day in the life” in the advertising and marketing industry? How can companies whose leadership profiles skew 85% white males hope to reach BIPOC?

Nanette Kirsch, September 23, 2020

The ANA Educational Foundation (AEF) recently published a report on marketing talent, suggesting that the profession suffers from a skills gap when it comes to data and analytics. As Marketing Dive reported, “Students pursuing careers in marketing lack a sturdy mathematical background that could help them better analyze and interpret the troves of consumer data companies are now putting a premium on.”

At Keen, we see it a bit differently. As a company that offers predictive marketing analytics solutions, it’s our experience that the gap is less about technical skills and more about critical-thinking skills.
The core responsibility of marketers is to attract and retain customers. This demands a forward focus that benefits from the visionary, creative and innovative mindsets that are hallmarks of marketers.

The increasing access to data creates opportunities for marketers to generate and validate their future-focused strategy through data-driven insights. But this doesn’t require a data science degree or even a strong mathematical orientation; it requires a pragmatic approach and strong critical-thinking skills in order to adroitly identify the boldest and most compelling strategies to drive business growth.

Without the right data, however, those bold decisions can mean too much risk for the business and become career-limiting for the marketer.

The growth in digital media over the last decade has compounded the volume of marketing data available. And in 2019, businesses increased their spending by 9.2% for research and intelligence, according to the CMO Survey.

So how can marketers most efficiently and effectively put that data to work? If you give your data scientists a large data set, they’ll happily dive in and pull out a wide array of fascinating findings. But too often, they lack the context to ensure their insights are relevant to the business decisions at hand, or relatable to other findings that, together, can provide useful guidance. In this paradigm, marketers are tasked with finding value in the insights made available to them.

I don’t believe this problem is solved by asking marketers to become data scientists. Rather, I believe it’s time to invert the paradigm and put the proverbial horse, in this case, the business decision, before that cart chock-full of marketing data.

In this framework, marketers’ highest value comes from challenging the strategies available to achieve their growth goals and then deploying data experts and analytics technologies to deliver insights in service of those goals. And then, seek to continuously refine and optimize their strategy as new data becomes available. The emergence of analytics technologies can accelerate the utility and accessibility of data for this type of decision support.

Every day, marketers are making decisions: How much do I invest in marketing and where? Should I launch this new product? Which campaign should I produce?

Here are the steps a data-driven marketer should take to make the best decision:

1. Frame the decision. Your framework should articulate the choice, as well as the determining factor(s). Is your primary goal to drive more revenue or greater household penetration?

2. Pursue data that supports your decision. If you have analytics resources on your team, share your framework and ask them to provide data you can use to help guide your decision. If you have to do the legwork on your own, be cautious not to get lost in the data, and tether the data you extract to your framework. If it doesn’t inform that framework, it is not useful to your decision-making.

3. Test and refine. In today’s market, it is easier to make short-term decisions. When possible, especially if the data has sent you in a new direction, conduct a short-term test. Gather live data that, again, supports your frame; reassess and either refine or redirect as a result.

4. Be bold. As a marketer, your responsibility is to drive value for your business. Real value doesn’t come from weak-kneed decisions. It comes from well-informed and well-reasoned decisions that take calculated risks to break from the pack and make a big impact. With a stronger, data-driven framework behind you, you’ll have the insights and confidence to make those moves.

In the ANA Educational Foundation report’s executive summary, Ed Timke, an instructor at Duke University, frames it like this: “When working with data, it’s important to ask really good questions. It might start off with one question and then evolve. One shouldn’t take the initial question at face value, though. Instead, one should interrogate it and push to understand the dimensions of that particular problem.”

The report also states, “Data can play a crucial role to make key business decisions. The data itself doesn’t make that decision. People ultimately make those decisions.”

Precisely.

MTV and ViacomCBS Entertainment & Youth Group are joining forces with the Ad Council to educate college students about proactively preventing the spread of COVID-19.

The #BacktoSchoolTogether digital campaign features a free media toolkit for colleges and universities that consists of a style guide and a suite of creative assets that schools can customize across their social channels and digital platforms.

In addition, there are three creative campaigns, each focused on a specific issue. Delcan & Co and Block & Tackle worked with MTV’s in-house creative team to create the spots.

The first campaign entitled “Do it for Everyone” includes two spots that tap into the value of peer culture, community support and compliance for following public health guidance.

The second campaign includes a series of four informational spots that introduces Dr. Darien Sutton-Ramsey, an emergency medicine physician, to address myths that have been disseminated among young people.

The third features a duo of animated spots that promote the need to “slow the spread” through mask-wearing, social distancing and washing hands.

The PSAs direct students to backtoschooltogether.com to get additional tips and information as well as resources for mental health support. The spots will air across all platforms of the ViacomCBS Entertainment & Youth Group brands starting Sept. 14 during its “Back to School” week.

“The #AloneTogether campaign resonates with younger audiences because it meets them wherever they are – on social channels and platforms,” explains Jacqueline Parkes, CMO and executive vice president digital studios for ViacomCBS Entertainment & Youth Group. “We are leveraging our 600 million social media following to connect directly to students with these important messages that can keep them safe at this critically important time.”

Other partners leveraging their respective platforms include The ANA Educational Foundation, the American Hospital Association and NASPA – Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, The Jed Foundation and Swank Motion Pictures.

Joe Mandese. March 4, 2020.

There’s a fundamental disconnect between the goals of the ad industry to become more serious, analytical and both quantitatively and qualitatively “data-intensive” and the culture of American universities educating the next generation of industry professionals.

That’s the top-line finding of an in-depth study of marketing, advertising and communications professors conducted by the Association of National Advertisers ANA Education Foundation (AEF).

The report, “Bridging The Analytics Disconnect: Charting A More Data-Driven Pathway To Growth,” was released this morning and finds that the vast majority of professors perceive that students see the industry as “fun” and “creative,” but not necessarily as “analytical” and “quantitative.”

“At my institution, students who gravitate toward advertising are not math or computer skills-oriented,” said Saleem Alhabash, associate professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University, who participated in the study.

“The perception is that advertising is not a math-heavy major. These students often lack the confidence necessary to acquire analytics skills,” he explained.

The study, which interviewed 150 academics in the fall of 2019, recommends the industry takes steps to:

• Update perception of marketing and advertising from just fun and creative to include quantitative and analytical.
• Build bridges between professors and analytics executives to produce marketing and advertising case studies for the benefit of students.
• Offer broader softer skills for data and analytics executives and students entering the advertising and marketing industries.

“The use of data and analytics in marketing will only grow exponentially in the coming years, and it’s essential that we develop the talent we will need to use those tools in the most cost-effective and productive manner possible,” stated ANA CEO Bob Liodice.

Kelsey Davis. February 12, 2020.

College graduates prefer to work for companies that value their desire to bring innovation and passion into the workplace. The Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) execution of its Best Jobs You’ve Never Heard Of video captures that perfectly. The purpose of the campaign is to express that marketing has all of the best jobs you’ve never heard of — whether that’s making plastic a thing of the past, designing an app that improves society, or writing tweets in the voice of a cartoon cat.

I sat down with Elliot Lum, senior vice president of talent strategy and program development at ANA Educational Foundation (AEF), to discuss the research, innovation, and insights that drove this campaign towards success. Lum is responsible for leading the AEF’s efforts towards shaping the future of marketing talent.

The majority of the jobs included in the video were categorized by interests, passions, and values common among today’s 18- to 24-year-olds. ANA’s goal was to focus the campaign around those interests and passions while educating them on data-driven marketing jobs they might be unaware of.

When asked about the research behind the campaign, Lum explained that global advertising agency McCann conducted research with ANA to understand the gen Z mindset, noting that McCann CEO Chris McDonald is on the board of AEF. One goal of the research was to answer the question, “How do we market marketing to gen Z?” The core insight from the research is that gen Z perceives marketing as ads and selling.

Lum pushed back on this stigma: “We tried our best to communicate that marketing is so much more than that. Marketing encompasses the creative, the analytical, the purposeful, the innovative — all things students actually want to pursue in the field.”

Gen Z consumers grew up in an era of brands’ oversaturated digital marketing efforts, so we have a heightened sense of awareness for when we’re being sold versus when we’re being empowered. But the campaign is meant to go beyond that to show the potential career opportunities.

Although the Best Jobs You’ve Never Heard Of video may be most relevant to prospective, digitally native gen Z employees, it’s also relevant to gen X and millennial employees, who may be interested in shifting in their careers by reskilling and upskilling. ANA offers certifications for those workers through a program called Certified ANA Marketing Professional Program (CAMP), where interested candidates attend 40 hours of training on a suite of marketing tools, from data analytics to creative brief writing. Lum noted how attracting and retaining talent through this type of training is essential to ensuring that companies thrive during this digital transformation era.

Still, reaching gen Z can be a challenge for executives in advertising, marketing, and media. “The stores, trade associations, and even us as a foundation, are very B2B…, and our business models are all industry-facing,” Lum said. “Therefore, our mechanism to talk with students is typically through professors, which causes a gap. That’s why partnering [for the campaign] with a platform like WayUp, with 5.5 million students, was so great because it enabled us to market towards students directly.”

ANA’s Best Jobs You’ve Never Heard Of campaign recognizes the talent needs of the marketing industry and brilliantly synergized them with the interests and passions of gen Z college students looking to kickstart their career. “I want the audience to be motivated to learn more,” Lum said. “I want them to go to the job board [at WayUp], look for a role, and hopefully be inspired to break their perception of marketing as not just advertising and creative, but also as analytical, quantitative, and strategic — the right brain and left brain merged together.”

Lou Killeffer. June 9, 2019

I was recently interviewed by the Association of National Advertisers’ AEF for their forthcoming study, “Bridging the Analytics Disconnect: Charting a More Data Driven Way to Growth.”

ANA Educational Foundation (AEF): Created in 1983, the AEF connects the advertising, marketing, and academic communities to promote marketing and advertising while informing and inspiring the next generation of talent. The AEF distributes content on advertising and marketing through a variety of programs on college campuses; programming that has historically helped attract top tier graduates to the business.

In 2017, the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF) published “Bridging the Talent Disconnect: Charting the Pathways to Future Growth in the Marketing and Advertising Industries”. Among the study’s key findings:

1. Digital transformation has complicated traditional marketing and advertising career paths. Digital platforms have dramatically changed the way brands communicate with consumers. And significant new marketing roles that didn’t exist before, like social media and digital analytics managers, require additional, fundamentally different “hard skills” focused on data management and advanced analytics.

2. Marketers and their ad agencies now compete directly with technology companies for the best talent. As demand for digital expertise and data analytics increases, marketers and their agencies are increasingly competing with GAFA – Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple – all of which offer generous compensation to entry level hires and use tech’s more aggressive recruiting tactics to connect with and close talent faster than their traditional marketing and ad centric rivals.

3. College curricula can’t keep up with the pace of rapid change in the industry. A great deal of course work, and the vast majority of textbooks, are out of date almost as soon as they’re published. And much of what’s being taught today about marketing and communications is sadly outdated and largely unrelated to current corporate concerns and expectations; much less students’ actual experience when they enter the field.

(All of which I’ve tried to address first hand in a new course created at the request of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: “Advertising in the Age of Alexa, AI, and Algorithms or: How to Stop Worrying and Build Your Brand”. In part, the class addresses how the never-ending cascade of content on powerful platforms has reshaped how we live our lives – with profound consequences on our shopping behavior, purchase decisions, and the marketing strategies designed to engage us as consumers through “advertising”.​​ We also assess how many previously proven marketing communications methods – and entire ad-based business and service models – have been challenged, and ultimately destroyed and discarded in the process.)

The AEF’s new study is a direct response to the growing concern that marketing and advertising face a real and pressing analytics crisis. The accelerating explosion of consumer data requires companies and brands to manage the tools and technology to gather, sort, and analyze these inputs to drive decision making. The obvious disconnect is that marketers lack the analytical systems and talent to structure their data and turn it into the actionable insights that drive growth.

“Bridging the Analytics Disconnect”, with a planned publishing date of January 2020, will examine how industry and academia can collaborate to attract a richer, better prepared pipeline of analytical talent to the industry.

Diana Pearl. February 20, 2019

The ANA Educational Foundation released a report this week detailing the challenges that the advertising industry still faces when it comes to hiring and retaining employees of color.

“Charting a More Diverse Pathway to Growth” focused on three demographics: African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans. It was done in conjunction with a 2017 study from the Advertising Educational Foundation (AEF) called “Bridging the Talent Disconnect: Charting Pathways to Future Growth.” The most impactful conclusion from the report is that marketers have a long way to go when it comes to creating an inclusive atmosphere at companies for people of color.

The four key factors the survey identified were management disconnect, microaggressions, cultural illiteracy and workplace integration dissonance. Removing the jargon, that translates to managers not understanding the challenges and difficulties their employees face with regard to diversity, small actions that are “interpreted as insults to [an employee’s] culture and intelligence,” a lack of cultural understanding in the workplace and refraining from beginning a dialogue about diversity in the office over fear of professional retaliation or losing their jobs.

With the report’s results, the ANA’s Talent Forward Alliance set four guidelines to help marketers correct these factors and foster a more inclusive environment: rebuilding reputation with students, reconnecting with academia, recruiting and retaining with purpose and reinventing for the present and future.

The hope is that marketers will increase awareness of the industry with students, starting with better communication with those in the academic realm of marketing. Once students are out of school, marketers should work to recruit, hire and retain diverse talent, and build the right environment for that sort of growth to happen.

“Talent development does not rest on the shoulders of just the human resources department,” said Elliot Lum, svp of talent strategy and program initiatives for the AEF, in a statement accompanying the report. “It’s a shared and coordinated responsibility across HR, marketing, advertising and diversity leaders to enable and empower talent to drive growth for their organizations.”

One hundred and twenty interviews contributed to the AEF’s study, including CMOs, college students, marketing professors, agency executives and human resources team members.

Oliver McAteer. February 20, 2019

Talent agency says company emphasis on unique culture gets in way of inclusivity as ANA publishes report on broken diversity model.

Companies must challenge their own culture to fix the disconnect in diversity efforts, a leading recruitment agency has stressed.

It comes as a new Association of National Advertisers (ANA) study revealed that recruiting and retaining racially-diverse talent continues to vex marketers due to a breakdown between the resources being invested in initiatives and a lack of inclusiveness felt by diverse workers.

“Companies often hire for diversity and beat it out of them,” said Debra Sercy, joint-CEO at Grace Blue, who leads the agency’s diversification efforts. She spoke to diversity in the wider sense that includes other important factors like age, gender and faith.

“A company’s emphasis on its unique culture can get in the way of inclusivity. They hire for diversity and celebrate diversity during the recruitment process, but once someone comes into the company they will often try to assimilate that candidate into their own culture. They beat out the diversity. Therefore, some of the differences for which this person was hired are no longer seen or valued.”

The report, published today, found three underrepresented populations in the advertising, marketing, and media industries: African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans.

When interviewed for the study, a group of racially-diverse new hires and students indicated that breaking into the marketing industry and staying in the business is incredibly difficult.

They identified four key factors: a management disconnect in which new hires appreciate being provided with opportunities, but workplace relationships are still not optimal; microaggressions in which co-workers engage in offensive behaviors that leave the respondents feeling uncomfortable, disrespected, and helpless to address such behavior; a cultural illiteracy whereby a lack of cultural understanding make them feel on edge and; workplace integration dissonance — meaning many new hires feel uncomfortable starting conversations around diversity due to a perceived risk of losing their jobs.

“In six-and-a-half years, I have never had one single client pass up the right candidate to get a diverse candidate,” explained Sercy.

“Clients genuinely want diverse points of view — they do not want to just fill out a scorecard and say how many African-Americans and females they’ve hired. They will always do what’s in the best interests of the business, and often that is a diverse candidate — of all sorts.”

Sercy stressed that companies “must change the culture and not the person,” highlighting the high exit rate among new employees.

She believes marketers should be using their own skills to target a very underrepresented area for future talent — high schoolers, or any young person who doesn’t know that their creative passion can actually be commercialized.

“If more companies focused on marketing to that group, you will change the future of the industry,” Sercy added.

The ANA report, which was based on 120 interviews with key stakeholders in the advertising and marketing industries conducted between April and October of last year, echoes Glace Blue’s recommendations. It urges marketers to follow guidelines set forth by the Talent Forward Alliance to help them attain progress in attracting diverse people.

Created in 2018, the alliance is a cross-industry initiative committed to inspiring and accelerating the development of exceptional talent to fuel marketing industry growth. It is designed to create a unified movement to elevate the industry as a career profession on university campuses.

“Talent development does not rest on the shoulders of just the human resources department,” said Elliot Lum, ANA Educational Foundation SVP of talent strategy and program initiatives. “It’s a shared and coordinated responsibility across HR, marketing, advertising, and diversity leaders to enable and empower talent to drive growth for their organizations.”

Richard Whitman. February 21, 2019

The ANA Educational Foundation is out with a new report (the legwork was farmed out to market research firm Egg Strategy) on the marketing industry’s efforts to recruit minorities in a bid to make its talent pool more diverse.

A more diverse workforce, most believe will result in better more effective marketing and advertising executions leading to broader consumer buy-in and generally better business results.

And as you probably know from working in the sector, efforts to broaden talent diversity in the space have come up short, despite numerous well-intentioned initiatives, and the new report underscores the fact that a lot more work needs to be done.

The new study concludes there is a “fundamental disconnect between the resources being invested in diversity initiatives and the lack of belonging which diverse students and new hires felt in their respective environments.”

Furthermore, “the industry has focused too narrowly on improving diversity numbers and scorecards. Instead the focus must now shift to how we can be more inclusive as an industry, both to attract and retain outstanding diverse talent. Greater inclusivity is the key to improving diversity, and it has been demonstrated more diverse teams drive business growth.”

The report cites a number of factors that have slowed the push toward inclusivity and diversity including management disconnects, microaggressions and cultural illiteracy.

The report spells out just how white the marketing sector remains. Looking at the ANA membership overall, the racial composition is 74% white, 10% Asian, 8% Hispanic and 6% African American. Looking at CMOs within the organization, 87% are white, 5% are Asian, 5% are Hispanic and 3% are African American. Egg also pulled some stats for a group of 17 ANA member companies which show that staffing throughout their organizations remain overwhelmingly white.

The numbers of course prompt the question: What is the right level of diversity? And it’s not that easy to quantify. In the report ANA CEO Bob Liodice states, “Let’s have the conversation about it. If we agree to 50 percent more diversity, is that the right number? Does it give me the optimal performance for growth? It’s hard to tell.”

The report concludes that “There is a universal sense that the numbers need to be better, but there is no consensus within the industry — or in most companies — what those target numbers are to maximize business growth.”

What will help, the report surmises, is an industry forum to share data and talk about it. “Not being able to see the numbers or have the right forum to discuss these kinds of numbers minimizes the amount of progress we make as an industry. We will all have diversity and inclusion discussions at our respective companies, but the action is happening in isolated pockets instead of a cohesive group. Sharing those numbers is one opportunity.”

William Gipson, president, end-to-end packaging transformation and chief diversity officer at Procter & Gamble is quoted in the report: “Diversity is not something that we should compete with other companies on, but something we as a business community should embrace together, to raise us all up.”

Added Chris Macdonald, global president of advertising at McCann Worldgroup: “We know that diversity is an imperative for all of us, but it has to be driven by actions. This study helps us focus and realize that we have to collaborate as an industry and with academia to find new ways to drive actions to address this issue now.”

There’s a lot more in the report which can be accessed here.

Erica Sweeney. February 20, 2019

Dive Brief:
•Marketers continue to struggle with recruiting and retaining racially diverse talent, because of a disconnect in the resources they invest in diversity initiatives and the lack of inclusiveness that diverse workers feel, according to findings of a new report by the Association of National Advertisers Educational Foundation (AEF) shared with Marketing Dive.
•For the study, a group of racially diverse students and new hires were interviewed and revealed four areas that affected their breaking into the industry and staying in the business, including management disconnect, microaggressions, cultural illiteracy and difficulty having conversations around diversity. Underrepresented populations in the industry, which the report focused on, include African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans.
•The report recommends marketers can better attract and retain diverse talent by following guidelines in the ANA’s Talent Forward Alliance, created in 2018 to help the marketing industry grow by developing top talent. The alliance is also creating an inclusiveness index to measure the level of inclusiveness at marketing agencies.

Dive Insight:

While the marketing industry has created initiatives aimed at promoting diversity, the ANA’s new AEF report suggests that the industry focused “too narrowly” on numbers and scorecards, and has a lot of work to do to attract more diverse teams. Now, marketers are urged to rethink their approach to diversity so that they can recruit and retain top talent from underrepresented populations.

Marketing leaders should take note of the areas which the new hires and students cited as barriers to breaking into and being successful in the industry, and work to mend the disconnect. Focusing on inclusivity is key for the marketing industry’s growth as it looks to attract the next generation. Gen Z is the most ethnically and racially diverse generation, and promoting inclusivity suggests to the new generation that their voices truly matter within the industry, that they belong and their talent is needed, the report suggests.

The industry also has a ways to go when it comes to the diversity of leadership. Only 13% of CMOs or CMO equivalents are people color: 5% are Hispanic/Latin, 5% are Asian and 3% are black, according to a separate ANA report. However, in a sign of progress, 45% top marketing positions at ANA client-side member organizations are now held by women.

The ANA has also created several initiates aimed at helping marketers be more inclusive and sensitive in representing women and minorities — not just in their offices, but in their campaigns, including #SeeHer and the Alliance for Multicultural Marketing. Major advertisers, like Unilever and Procter & Gamble, have created their own initiatives to remove outdated stereotypes from their marketing efforts.

February 21, 2019

Recruiting and retaining racially diverse talent continues to vex marketers due to a fundamental disconnect between the resources being invested in diversity initiatives and a lack of inclusiveness felt by diverse workers. Those were among the key conclusions of a study by the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF) that explored why the marketing and advertising industries have traditionally and consistently encountered difficulty attracting and retaining diverse talent.

Three underrepresented populations in the advertising, marketing, and media industries were at the core of the report: African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans.

According to a release, the report, “Charting a More Diverse Pathway to Growth,” follows a 2017 AEF study, “Bridging the Talent Disconnect: Charting Pathways to Future Growth,” which identified significant structural disconnects between academia and industry. This year’s study uncovered the same structural disconnects when analyzing this issue through a racially diverse lens.

“There have been many admirable initiatives to try to solve how we can improve the mix and quality of diverse talent in the industry,” the report said. “However, the industry has focused too narrowly on improving diversity numbers and scorecards. Instead the focus must now shift to how we can be more inclusive as an industry, both to attract and retain outstanding diverse talent.”

The study also concluded that inclusivity signals to the next generation of talent that their voices truly matter, that they belong in the marketing and advertising industry, and that their talent is sorely needed.

When interviewed for the study, a group of racially diverse new hires and students indicated that breaking into the marketing industry and staying in the business was incredibly difficult. They identified four key factors:

◦Management Disconnect: While new hires appreciate being provided with opportunities, workplace relationships are still not optimal. Several respondents said they feel like their managers can’t relate to the challenges they face regarding diversity, and they often don’t trust them to share these experiences or perspectives for fear of “causing trouble” and retaliation (e.g., delayed promotion).

◦Microaggressions: New hires described experiences best characterized as microaggressions, which were interpreted as insults to their culture and intelligence. These included incidents in which coworkers engaged in offensive behaviors that left the respondents feeling uncomfortable, disrespected, and helpless to address such behavior.

◦Cultural Illiteracy: Many minority new hires said a lack of cultural understanding in the workplace made them feel on edge, trying to ensure they didn’t inadvertently cross a line, but also making sure that past stereotypes weren’t assigned to them.

◦Workplace Integration Dissonance: New hires indicated they often felt uncomfortable starting conversations around diversity due to a perceived risk of losing their jobs. When organic cultural conversations happened, new hires said they carefully picked and chose their battles, mostly opting not to engage to avoid conflict and not to be heard as a lone voice in the room.

The report recommended that marketers follow the guidelines set forth by the ANA’s Talent Forward Alliance to help them attain progress in attracting diverse talent.

A copy of the full report is available at https://aef.com/diversity-disconnect/.

Jessica Wohl. AdAge. November 23, 2018

Fourteen months after the Association of National Advertisers issued a scathing report highlighting academia’s lackluster role in preparing students for jobs in the industry, its ANA Educational Foundation (AEF) says it’s making inroads into fixing the problem.

The report had found that universities bear much of the blame, with outdated curricula and a lack of real-world preparation. But the AEF now says there’s growing interest within the industry, and colleges, in several programs it has to get schools and students up to speed: These efforts, known as Pathways 2020, include more emphasis on bringing professors into agencies and marketers to advance their own learnings; increasing the number of executives who visit campuses; and, importantly, a summer internship program, which launched this year.

“It’s frankly been shocking to see the eroding quality of interns that are coming through,” says Bill Imada, chairman of Interpublic-owned multicultural agency IW Group and a member of the AEF board. “We’re definitely seeing people that are coming through the door that cannot write.” And larger agencies often scoop up the best talent, he says

The internship program, Marketing and Advertising Education (MADE), developed with input from companies including IBM, Mastercard, Verizon, Ogilvy and McCann, has a rigorous submission process. Early evidence suggests it’s working. IW Group’s summer intern, from Chapman University in California, “is an exceptional writer and a confident speaker and presenter,” says Imada. IBM, meanwhile, was so pleased with its intern that it gave her a job, says Ann Rubin, IBM’s VP of corporate marketing and an AEF board member.

The AEF wants to put 1,000 students through the internship and other “immersion” programs, such as member-only conferences the AEF began holding on college campuses this year, by 2020. More than 700 applied for MADE this year, with 32 securing spots at 29 companies. The program hopes 50 companies will offer MADE internships in summer 2019.

The AEF has made other inroads into increasing the interactions between academia and real-world companies. The lack of such cross-pollination in general, not just via the AEF, is an issue that concerns many professors.

“There’s some disconnect between academia and the industry,” says Mindy Welch. The associate professor of marketing at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor entered academia seven years ago after working as a creative services manager at Scott & White Health, a Texas health-care system. (Her first move, she says, was to put more real-world experiences into the curriculum, such as having students craft three-year strategic marketing plans for local businesses to emphasize long-term planning.)

The AEF’s goal is to have 1,000 executives make on-campus visits by 2020 (so far this year, there have been 250, up from about 150 a year ago, it says) and 1,000 professors engaged in on-site industry experiences and visits. Other programs the AEF offers to professors include roundtables with practitioners, and an annual colloquium run by the AEF academic journal Advertising and Society Quarterly.

“It seems that every time I go out, I’m learning something new that, frankly, didn’t exist before,” says Jef Richards, who teaches in Michigan State University’s advertising, and public relations department and who has visited agencies including Leo Burnett, Doner and Campbell Ewald. He’s boosted his knowledge, he says, about everything from “analytics to geofencing.”

Auditing a class

At Loyola University Chicago, replicating the real world includes getting real about deadlines.

“Done and delivered is better than perfect and late,” says Stacy Neier Beran, a senior lecturer in the university’s Quinlan School of Business. This semester, her marketing research students are preparing RFIs, RFPs and campaigns for BMO Harris Bank and for a Chicago Fair Trade coffee line. The marketers review the work.

To help create an authentic work environment, students gather in Loyola’s Schreiber Center in downtown Chicago instead of meeting in a lecture hall. There, in the tech hub, they learn how to use programs such as IBM’s SPSS statistical analysis software. On other days, teams of students congregate at conference tables, often with their heads buried in their laptops, communicating via Slack. It doesn’t get more real-world than that.

Raja Rajamannar. AdAge. December 12, 2017

Programmatic media. Dynamic ad creation. Blockchains. Virtual reality. Augmented Reality. Chatbots. Artificial Intelligence. I have been in the field of marketing for more than 30 years, and more has changed over the past five years or so than the preceding 20. The kind of changes that technology and data are driving is incredible.

The modern marketer’s toolkit has expanded dramatically, and with that, the talent and skill set required to be successful. Not only do you need to be classically trained, you need to be a technologist, a data scientist, a communicator, a financial analyst, a business manager, etc. We are looking for superhuman marketers, and unfortunately there are not enough of them out there today. And that’s on us.

We are the leaders of this great field. And it’s time we do more to energize and revive our craft. This is why I became an executive champion at the ANA’s Educational Foundation, and why I feel strongly that we can do more for our industry by partnering with universities to develop those superhuman marketers of tomorrow.

Successful brands build multigenerational teams that work together with diverse strengths, experiences and expertise. They are not just setting the strategy for next year, but looking beyond to ensure that we are driving the future. As we think about priorities for 2018, marketers must put talent development at the top, following through on these two imperatives to support academia and students in the classroom today.

Put universities on your speaking circuit

As marketing leaders, we are always delivering keynotes and participating in panel discussions at a number of industry events. Take that to the classroom. Connect with your HR recruitment teams and your alma mater. Raise your hand to get involved, and look for those opportunities to visit campus; become a guest lecturer and spend time with the students in the classroom.

From the communications side of the house, one of the most contemporary courses on the syllabus today involves social media and digital communications in business. The best way for students to learn about new tools — and the innovative ways they are being deployed to improve business operations and reputation — is to hear directly from the communication professionals using them today.

This is important for the students just as much as it is for your brand. These are valuable interactions that can help with qualified internship leads in the future.

Spend time with professors; invite them to shadow you

Professors shape the theoretical views, themes and ideas that are the foundation of any good marketer’s skill set, and help students develop the right mindset, process and approach, regardless of the latest technology. As marketers, we live in the present: putting ideas into action; managing campaigns in real-time; testing and learning with all the new tools and data at our disposal. Building innovative marketers requires efforts on both sides — the classical theory and contemporary strategy.

Inviting professors to spend time with you and your team will give them a real sense of the behind-the-scenes at work. The marketing profession is evolving in real time. Having professors shadow you for a period of time, or over the course of a campaign, will provide them with a fresh and highly relevant perspective that they can bring back to the classroom.

Talent is our industry’s most precious resource. It’s an issue that affects and impacts all of us — marketers and agencies alike. It’s most visible when students join our organizations. But what we need to do as an industry is to forge much deeper relationships with academia. I am personally invested in this because I want to give back to my craft, which has given me my bread and butter all these years.

Bottom line: take the time to invest in developing talent and to give back to our beloved profession. Get involved and start today.

Caroline Cooke. Marketing Insight. November 17, 2017.

The once-glamorous world of marketing and advertising is losing its sex appeal.

Millennials aren’t buying in to careers in the industry. Instead, marketing organizations and ad agencies are losing top talent to technology companies that offer “purpose” and “culture,” according to the study “Bridging the Talent Disconnect.”

The Association of National Advertiser’s Educational Foundation (AEF) conducted the study to better understand the growing challenges of new talent acquisition in the industry. The study surveyed stakeholders representing various aspects of the industry, including professionals, educators, and students.

We had the opportunity to speak with ANA Educational Foundation President Gordon McLean, who shared his unique insights into the study’s findings. He also provided recommendations on how to reverse this troublesome trend.

The study revealed four major areas of disconnect between industry professionals, academia, and students.

1. Digital transformation is constantly evolving its skill requirements

In the age of digital marketing, top talent is considered a “T-shaped candidate” – someone who’s both qualitative and quantitative in their approach. The peanut butter and the jelly.

“Does that sound like a tall order?” McLean asks. “One CEO says, ‘We’re looking for super-humans.’ They don’t exist, but you need that single discipline area of expertise…with an indication that there’s more capability in critical thinking to come.”

Some recent graduates lack the skills needed for marketing today because they don’t know what skills to focus on. Many students have a murky understanding of what constitutes a career in marketing or advertising. One reason: Roles and responsibilities are constantly evolving, making it hard to map out a successful long-term career path. From the outside, the career ladder in marketing and advertising looks more like a “jungle gym,” the study says.

Some students aren’t even thinking about the skills they need in terms of their coursework. Instead, they’re focused on getting real world experience through internships, which they see as a critical opportunity to separate theory from reality.

Plus, the life of Don Draper doesn’t appeal to many modern-day millennials. “Mad Men has done more to raise awareness to marketing and advertising than any other program or initiative,” McLean says. “It’s probably also done more to damage the credibility and meaningfulness of it as a profession.”

Millennials see the work of advertising as “lacking purpose,” according to the study—a direct slap in the face to anyone who’s worked on an advertisement or marketing campaign that’s actually inspired positive action.

2. Universities and businesses disagree on who’s responsible for training marketers

It takes a village to raise a marketer or advertiser, yet the industry wants fully-formed professionals upon graduation. Does the industry also want newborn babies to come out potty-trained?

Colleges and universities are expected to transform rowdy teenagers into skilled professionals in just four years. They’re also facing increased pressure to cover new material that meets ever-changing industry needs in that short time frame. But educational institutions are unprepared to keep up with the speed of digital transformation and its shifting skill sets, leaving many graduates unprepared for jobs in the field.

Educators are trying to balance providing a job-focused education with their primary purpose of developing well-rounded leaders. Students are frustrated that half of their college experience is spent taking general education courses, which may prepare them for backup careers as Jeopardy contestants, but doesn’t provide them with enough opportunity to explore multiple career paths.

One area universities are making some headway is incorporating analytics into course curriculum. Many graduates trained in analytics find themselves at a significant advantage, as its importance continues to increase.

Given the speed of change, the only way for universities to develop job-ready graduates is if the industry is involved with curriculum planning and internships. After all, students are graduating from college, not Hogwarts. According to McLean, “Agencies have to take the lead.”

3. Tech companies are competing for talent with better culture and pay

Due to the huge demand for data analytics and digital expertise, marketing agencies are on the losing end of a talent war with technology companies. Tech company are offering millennials culture, purpose, work-life balance, stock options, napping pods, travel sabbaticals, and avocado toast with a side of “purpose.” The hoodies are beating the suits.

“If you look at where marketing is as a career choice, even within a business faculty, out of the thirteen different business faculties, it’s probably number eleven,” McLean says. “We’re at a competitive disadvantage to virtually every other profession.”

To make matters worse, in the rush to keep pace with the speed of digital transformation, most marketing organizations and ad agencies have been focused on hastily filling immediate talent gaps instead of investing in the next generation of talent. “HR leaders tend to be hiring to fill immediate slots,” McLean says, “whereas, [marketing executives] are often thinking about, ‘How do I get the individual with the most long-term potential?’”

Agencies face an additional set of talent-related challenges, because they’re under pressure to deliver results for clients. Creative chiefs need skilled talent who can deliver those results without a steep learning curve, but they often struggle to find recent graduates who are prepared for even entry-level jobs in advertising and marketing.

4. Millennials have “great expectations”

Another issue is cultural fit. Some marketing and advertising industry professionals still balk at millennials’ desire for “purpose” and their “great expectations” for entry level positions. But this old-school mentality is backfiring. The industry is losing talent to other industries willing to meet millennials’ job demands.

“If there’s one thing that genuinely motivates students, it’s doing something that makes a difference,” McLean says. “It’s ironic. As marketers, we spend so much time putting purpose at the center of our companies, putting purpose at the center of our brands, and yet we really haven’t put purpose at the heart of our profession.”

Times have changed and the workforce has evolved. Millennials are taking over the workforce on their terms, which includes taking jobs that align with their interests and values.

The proposed solution

Simply put, the industry needs a rebrand.

The AEF is calling on marketers and advertisers to inspire the next generation of talent by shedding light on the purpose and significance of a career path in this field.

“Fantastic social campaigns are happening [in advertising]. So many initiatives are being done around gender equity, diversity, and building businesses,” McClean says. “We need to provide more certainty around the fact that this is not only a meaningful career, but it’s also one that can be financially rewarding over time.”

In response to these needed industry changes, the AEF has created Pathways 2020—a three-part movement that “aims to create a wider, more diverse, and better equipped pool of talent to fuel industry growth.”

1,000 Industry-Campus Activations

With 84% of students reporting improved perceptions of the industry after speaker visits, it’s time for marketing and advertising professionals to hit the pavement and find diverse, new talent. In fact, the study found that diverse workforces are 35% more likely to outperform their peers.

Marketing organizations and agencies also need to develop new recruiting patterns, rather than continuing to recruit from the same five or six schools. The good news is, “when it comes to the new breed of talent that we need it marketing, talent is everywhere,” McClean says. “Many of the schools that aren’t at the top of the radar are producing some of the most creative, highly motivated individuals. We just did a case competition at Wake Forest University; fifteen different schools [competed]. The school that won was Utah State University, and they beat Wharton and Northwestern.”

1,000 Professors Inspired

Professors need more industry exposure, so the AEF is asking industry leaders to offer visiting professor programs and industry fellowships. In addition, the AEF aims to collaborate with industry leaders on developing supplementary curriculum for professors and educational institutions.

1,000 Students Immersed

The AEF is also working to create an internship program that will help to provide a relatively standardized internship experience. “It’s not coming for ten weeks and working on a competitive analysis in some obscure category,” McLean says. “The intent is [for students] to be exposed to three to five of the things that constitute modern marketing.”

Industry heavyweights like GE, IBM, and NBC, are already working with the AEF to roll out this internship program in 2018. “We’re getting the industry behind us, and it’s not just marketers, it’s also their agency partners,” McLean adds.

The AEF is asking professionals to pledge a commitment to a speaker program, internship, or professor visit. We second the request. The best way to move marketing and advertising forward is together.

For full article

Erik Oster. Adweek, September 21, 2017.

A new study from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) found that the advertising industry is facing a “looming marketing and advertising talent crisis.”

The study, entitled “Bridging the Talent Disconnect: Charting the Pathways to Future Growth,” was funded by the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF) and conducted by market research company GfK. It surveyed marketing leaders, academics and students/new hires to arrive at its conclusions. Among the findings were that college students were unsure what a career in advertising and marketing entailed and whether it represented work they deemed “meaningful.”

The report found that this talent disconnect is “particularly acute in the lack of diversity throughout the industries examined in the report.”

“Finding and retaining talent has been a serious problem in our industry for some time. But this pioneering new study has revealed that the system to create our next generation of marketing and advertising talent is strained to a breaking point,” ANA CEO Bob Liodice said in a statement. “Immediate action is required, and the AEF has developed the necessary steps to address this critical issue by bridging the gap between the core constituents.”

“Our next generation of talent will be the single most important driver of industry growth,” added AEF president-CEO Gord McLean. “Marketers and agencies must take the lead, but we know from experience that whenever we get together with the academic community the most important players – the students themselves – benefit.”

The report cited four key reasons for the disconnect between advertising agencies and marketers, academics and students: the digital transformation of the ad industry, increased competition from tech companies, “differing generational expectations of work environment, job responsibilities and career advancement,” and academic curricula not keeping pace with the rapid changes in the industry.

The ANA and AEF issued a call to action for agencies and marketers to partner with educators to address these concerns, a collection of initiatives known as Pathways 2020. Pathways 2020 includes industry campus visits and an expanded “Visiting Professors” program, as well as “formal, ‘accredited’ guidelines and best practices for internship experiences.”

McLean added that AEF will partner with ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive & Multicultural Marketing (AIMM), which launched last October, to ensure that “diversity will inform every aspect of Pathways 2020 program development.”

E.J. Schultz. AdAge, September 21, 2017.

Advertisers have been bemoaning the lack of talent in the field for years and the industry’s leading trade group has officially confirmed long-nagging suspicions: Feeder schools are way behind the times and tech titans are more than happy to mop up the brain drain.

The Association of National Advertisers has issued a scathing new report that — without necessarily shocking anyone — lays bare core challenges in the industry: Marketers and ad agencies face a “looming marketing and advertising talent crisis” because universities aren’t keeping pace with the industry’s changing needs. The study calls for more collaboration between marketing professionals and educators.

The association also found that more young workers are fleeing to consultancies and tech giants such as Facebook, Apple and Google that offer more generous salaries and perks.

Marketers and agencies are struggling to “decipher and adapt to the millennial mindset while being frustrated that recent graduates are often unprepared to enter the field,” according to the study. At the same time, young workers say they are not getting opportunities for rapid advancement. They perceive the tech and startup culture as providing more purposeful work and creative job environments, the study found.

“Finding and retaining talent has been a serious problem in our industry for some time,” said ANA CEO Bob Liodice said in a statement. “But this pioneering new study has revealed that the system to create our next generation of marketing and advertising talent is strained to a breaking point,” he added, calling for “immediate action.”

The report was commissioned by the ANA’s educational foundation, known as AEF, and conducted by market research company GfK. Results came from surveys of chief marketing officers, human resources executives, university professors and deans, career counselors and new hires and college students.

Jason DeLand, founding partner of Anomaly, was not involved with the study. But he agreed with its conclusion about competition from other industries for talent, saying marketing and advertising has “experienced an incredible and unfortunate brain drain.”

“If I graduated this year, I would not go into this industry,” he said in an email interview. “I might want to, but there would be greater and better opportunities for advancement elsewhere.” Agencies are “not making enough money and not being able to compete with other industries,” he added. “We ought to do away with the billable hour and stop giving ideas away cheaply in an effort to survive. Put more money into innovations.”

The study paints an especially dim view of academia, finding that “college and university curricula cannot keep pace with the rapid change going on in the industry.” Furthermore, “coursework and textbooks are out of date almost as soon as they’re published, and much that is taught about marketing and communications is outdated and unrelated to management expectations and students’ actual experience in the field,” the report states.

The study points to new digital channels that have led to new roles like social media and digital analytics managers that require skills such as data management and advanced analytics. But “these constantly evolving skill requirements and job definitions have made it difficult for marketers and agencies to define and promise clear career paths to students and prospective hires with any consistency,” according to the report.

As a solution, the ANA and AEF has started a new initiative called “Pathways 2020,” that seeks to deepen the industries ties with universities. The program pledges to organize more than 1,000 marketing and ad executive visits to college campuses by 2020, while creating a “formalized toolkit for industry representatives to ensure professional consistency of content and engagement.” The AEF is also ramping up an existing program in which professors visit agencies and marketers. The goal is to get 1,000 professors at sites by 2020. The AEF also wants to lure 1,000 students to participate in immersion programs like summer internships. The AEF is creating accredited guidelines for internship programs.

“Marketing educators can, and the majority probably do, keep close tabs on developments in industry and supplement any textbook with up-to-date cases and discussion of things happening in marketing and communications as the course is being taught,” Michelle Nelson, immediate past president of the Marketing Educators’ Association and a professor at Linfield College in Oregon, stated in an email interview.

She said the AEF program to connect professors and students with agencies and marketers is “extremely valuable.” She noted that “in the past agencies sometimes didn’t see the immediate value of such programs for them but they are essential to strengthen the relationship between education and practice.”

Derek Rucker, a professor of entrepreneurial studies in marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, said in an email that “it’s true that communications are evolving so fast that coursework and textbooks cannot capture everything,” But he added that “at Kellogg we interact a lot with people in firms, so I’d say we are getting exposure that helps us to stay up to speed and to work on research at the cutting edge.”

DeLand said a liberal arts education, not specialized marketing classes, is the “greatest foundation for this business.”

He added: “My advice to incoming kids in this years freshmen class is to cast the net wide. I don’t care if you can write a clever insta post, or a headline or design a logo or an app. I care deeply how you think. If you can solve problems and if you have a POV based on something real. If you can write, If you can think of ideas that power businesses and if you’re willing to work your ass off and learn too, then you’ll have my complete attention.”

Minda Smiley. The Drum, September 21, 2017.

The talent crisis facing the advertising and marketing industries is hitting a tipping point that could prove to be dire if clear steps aren’t taken to make the fields more appealing, according to a recent report out of the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF).

Attracting top-tier talent to the fields has been a topic of concern for some time now, but the conversation around the issue has gotten got louder in recent years as agencies struggle to lure candidates away from the likes of Facebook and Google as well as startups. The lack of female and minority representation has also given the advertising industry a bad rap as of late, a problem that’s led brands including HP, General Mills and Verizon to demand that their agency partners hire more women and people of colour.

The report found that both marketers and the agencies they work with are facing an “unprecedented talent challenge” that’s largely being driven by “a lack of common vision, vocabulary, and perceived relevance among marketers, young professionals, and the schools that are expected to educate them.” The study also found that students are unclear about career paths in marketing and advertising, and whether or not they constitute “meaningful” work.

Overall, the findings point to a large disconnect between students, universities and employers. According to the AEF, universities are struggling to develop courses that keep up with the changing nature of the marketing and advertising industries while still providing students with things like critical thinking skills. On top of that, the changing nature of the industries has led to course work and textbooks being “out of date almost as soon as they’re published,” which means much of what is being taught to students about the subject is outdated and unrelated to management expectations once they actually enter the field.

The rise of digital, social media and data-based roles has also posed an issue for both graduates and employers since the skills required for these roles are continually changing. According to the AEF, “these constantly evolving skill requirements and job definitions have made it difficult for marketers and agencies to define and promise clear career paths to students and prospective hires with any consistency.”

As marketers and agencies increasingly seek graduates with expertise in data analytics and digital capabilities, they’re finding that many of the people who are actually qualified for these positions would rather work for tech giants and consultancies instead. The study points out that companies like Google, Facebook, Apple and the Boston Consulting Group provide “more generous compensation packages to new hires, both in terms of salary and perks” in comparison to their marketing and advertising counterparts.

Aside from skill set and qualification issues, the study also found that “different generational expectations for job responsibilities, quality of life, and career advancement” are posing problems for marketing executives who aren’t sure how to effectively manage, motivate and retain this new crop of talent that prioritizes “creative” job environments and “purpose” in their work.

To remedy some of these issues, the AEF and ANA have outlined a number of steps that they plan to take in the coming years that will aim to inspire rather than alienate the next generation of talent. Called Pathways 2020, the initiative plans to “make the case for what a creative, innovative and rewarding career marketing can be.”

Part of the initiative involves expanding the AEF’s ‘Visiting Professors’ program, which gives professors a chance to spend time at an advertising or marketing firm so they can get a better sense of how the industries operate on a day-to-day basis. The AEF is aiming to give 1,000 professors on-site experiences by 2020.

The AEF also wants to send 1,000 marketing and advertising executives on campus visits by 2020. According to the AEF, it will “create a formalized toolkit for industry representatives to ensure professional consistency of content and engagement.”

The AEF is also instituting an internship program called ‘M/Ade’ that aims to better leverage the organizations’ academic relationships to connect students with internships that they’re interested in. In addition to a spring semester training program that will teach incoming interns about things like media transparency and multicultural marketing, the AEF is planning to partner with the ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive & Multicultural Marketing (AIMM) to ensure that “a healthy pipeline of diverse talent” is involved with the internship program.

“Finding and retaining talent has been a serious problem in our industry for some time,” said ANA chief executive Bob Liodice in a statement. “But this pioneering new study has revealed that the system to create our next generation of marketing and advertising talent is strained to a breaking point. Immediate action is required, and the AEF has developed the necessary steps to address this critical issue by bridging the gap between the core constituents.”

The report was conducted through market research firm GfK via 55 interviews with deans, professors, chief marketing officers, agency chief executives, human resources leaders and chief talent officers from the industry in addition to 10 focus groups with students and new hires across the US.

Developed by the ANA Educational Foundation, Program Is Part of ANA Masters Circle and Will Offer Paid Opportunities for Students at Marketers and Agencies

ORLANDO, Fla. (October 5, 2017) — The ANA (Association of National Advertisers) today announced a new summer internship program developed by the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF) for the next generation of leaders in the marketing and advertising industries.

The program, called MADE (Marketing and Advertising Education), will be a key pillar of the ANA’s Masters Circle, an initiative established last year to unite CMO agendas and create a powerful force to transform the industry. Currently almost 400 CMOs participate in some level of Masters Circle activity, which has included the introduction of a multicultural program called AIMM (Alliance for Inclusive & Multicultural Marketing) and the publication of a new CMO playbook filled with case studies from leading national advertisers.

Initially, MADE will include paid summer internships for 50 undergraduates at a wide range of participating marketing companies and advertising agencies. As the program evolves, the AEF will significantly increase the number of participating students each year.

“Internships, both in quantity and quality, have become the single most important hiring criterion for students entering our industry,” said AEF President-CEO Gord McLean. “Our goal is to make sure those internships provide the best quality experience for students, and to identify the best quality candidates for marketers and agencies.”

MADE originated from the findings uncovered in the recent AEF study “Bridging the Talent Disconnect: Charting Pathways to Future Growth.” That report revealed a serious divide among key constituents in the talent crunch currently embroiling the advertising and marketing industries. The study led the AEF to create a new initiative called Pathways 2020, which is designed to create a wider, more diverse, and better-prepared pool of talent to fuel industry growth.

The MADE program will officially be launched later this month. Applications will be open through the fall semester and interns will be selected at the start of the spring semester 2018. After interns are selected, the AEF will organize training sessions on key industry issues that will help prepare students for the program.

“Our recent study indicated that all industry stakeholders agree that substantive internship experiences are a key component in preparing students for a career in marketing and advertising,” said Elliot Lum, AEF vice president of talent strategy and program development. “With MADE, our goal is to channel the highest quality, most diverse talent into a best-in-class summer internship program that showcases the excitement, energy, and entrepreneurial spirit of what the marketing and advertising industry has to offer this next generation of leaders.”

PARTICIPATING COMPANIES
To date, almost 30 marketers and ad agencies have agreed to participate in the program, including the ANA, the Ad Council, Adobe, BBDO, Carhartt, DDB, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Horizon Media, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, IBM, J. Walter Thompson, MasterCard, McCann, Momentum, National Geographic Society, Ogilvy & Mather, Publicis Media, R/GA, Vonage, Walton Isaacson, and Xaxis.

Lum said additional goals for MADE include:

• Entry-Level Skills Standardization: Positioned as the “common app” for internships, this program will create entry-level skills standardization for the industry. It is an opportunity to identify the core skills that are necessary for the entire industry to evaluate future talent.
• Summer Intern Program Certification: The AEF will certify marketing and advertising summer intern programs to create industry thresholds for skills acquired, executive exposure, and project depth for this experience.
• Diversity Emphasis and Tracking: The AEF has partnered with the ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive & Multicultural Marketing (AIMM) to ensure a healthy pipeline of diverse talent coming into the summer internship program.

For more details, read MADE Internship Executive Summary.

Steve McClellan. MediaPost Agency Daily, September 21, 2017.

For years, the industry has talked about the challenges of hiring top young talent to join its ranks. Now, the ANA Educational Foundation has completed an in-depth report on the industry’s job pool and recruitment efforts.

It found what it calls “a looming marketing and advertising talent crisis.”

The report says the crisis is driven “in large measure by a lack of common vision, vocabulary and perceived relevance among marketers, young professionals and the schools that are expected to educate them.”

More specifically, the report cited the digital transformation for altering and enhancing post-graduate career paths, as well as the fact marketers and advertisers now compete directly with technology companies for top talent.

According to the report, expectations are also different for today’s generation of young talent, which is more likely to seek “purpose” in their work and “fun” job environments established by the start-up culture.

The report also states that college and university programs are not keeping pace with the rapid changes in the industry. “Course work and textbooks are out of date almost as soon as they’re published, and much that is taught about marketing and communications is outdated and unrelated to management expectations and students’ actual experience in the field.”

The report concludes that marketers and agencies need to “partner with educators to inspire and prepare the next generation of marketing and advertising leaders.” By doing so, the ANA and the Foundation believe a “wider, more diverse and better prepared pool of talent” can be created to fuel industry growth.

To that end, the ANA/AEF are establishing the “Pathways 2020” initiative. First steps include an effort by the AEF and the ANA to facilitate over 1,000 marketing and advertising executive campus visits by 2020.

In addition, the groups are taking greater strides to engage college professors. The AEF is expanding its current “Visiting Professors” program to ensure at least 1,000 professors will have on-site industry experiences by 2020, including participation in ANA member conferences and committee meetings.

AEF will also create formal “accredited” guidelines and best practices for internships to bring industry consistency in the identification, recruitment and training of students entering the marketing and advertising industry.

“Finding and retaining talent has been a serious problem in our industry for some time,” stated ANA CEO Bob Liodice. “But this pioneering new study has revealed that the system to create our next generation of marketing and advertising talent is strained to a breaking point.

“Immediate action is required, and the AEF has developed the necessary steps to address this critical issue by bridging the gap between the core constituents.”

“Our next generation of talent will be the single most important driver of industry growth,” added AEF President-CEO Gord McLean. “Marketers and agencies must take the lead, but we know from experience that whenever we get together with the academic community, the most important players – the students themselves – benefit.”

Rebecca Aston. Marketing Week, September 28, 2017.

The US Association of National Advertisers has revealed the extent of the talent crisis in the advertising and marketing industry.

Its scathing new report says marketers and advertising agencies face a “looming marketing and advertising talent crisis” because universities can’t keep up with the fast paced industry. The study acknowledges a need for more collaboration between professionals, educators and students.

The association found that young workers are more inclined to seek jobs in consultancies and tech giants such as Apple, Google and Facebook due to the more generous salaries and perks. Young workers have expressed that they are not getting opportunities for rapid advancement.

ANA CEO, Bob Liodice, says: “Finding and retaining talent has been a serious problem in our industry for some time. But this pioneering new study has revealed that the system to create our next generation of marketing and advertising talent is strained to a breaking point.”

As a solution, the ANA and AEF has started a new initiative called ‘Pathways 2020’, that seeks to deepen industry ties with universities.

Dwayne Waite Jr. Business 2 Community, September 22, 2017.

In late September, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) sent out a press release highlighting a study done by its academic arm, the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF). The study, assisted by research firm Gfk, asserts that there is a glaring disconnect between academic institutions, marketing professionals, and the marketing students who are being groomed to leap from academia to industry.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new.

Yes, from the time I was a student at university, I experienced first-hand how academia and industry were unaligned. The material I was charged to learn in the classroom was nearly irrelevant in my internships.

Previous Attempts to Fix the “Disconnect”

And professional organizations have been posturing to close the gap for years. The American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) launched an initiative years ago that would bring diverse and intelligent students to different agencies to get a taste of what real-life marketing looks like. The American Academy of Advertising (AAA, I know, not the best acronym for branding), has annual conferences bringing academic professors and professionals together to hash out issues and establish common beliefs and practices. But to what end?

This sentiment has been brewing in our marketing environment for decades, and it seems like our industry is quickly reaching a flashpoint.

The Looming “Crisis”

The study done by the ANA/AEF brings this disconnect up for two reasons. First, the disconnect is creating marketing pre-professionals who ‘seem’ to be ill-equipped for the current marketing environment. Secondly, with the rise of technology and analytics, the talent that the marketing and advertising industry would like to recruit, are going off to the startup and technology industries, where salaries are higher and workplaces are a little less stuffy.

Therefore, a ‘talent crisis’ in the ad world is looming.

Everyone’s to Blame

The ANA/AEF in the press release and on the AEF site highlights the ways it believes the organization can start addressing this disconnect, and therefore slow down the coming crisis. Below are the three calls to action the article highlights:

• •Getting 1,000 marketing and advertising executives to visit college campuses by 2020
• •Getting 1,000 marketing professors to have on-site industry experiences by 2020
• •Recruiting 1,000 students to the ANA/AEF Immersion Program and go through its internship program by 2020.

All of that is well and good, but it sounds to me that the ANA is saying that if academia and college students understand the industry better, than they’ll be better equipped to go into industry. And true, that’s part of it. But there’s again, a glaring piece missing here.

Where does it say for the industry to itself to change in a manner that makes it more attractive to the newer generations? The marketing industry has some skin in the game too.

Believing that simply showing college professors and students real-life marketing experiences will cull their expectations and get them excited to jump into an industry that refuses to change itself, is foolish and insulting.

What Can the Marketing and Advertising Industry Do?

If the marketing and advertising industry is competing for talent against the tech and consulting industries, wouldn’t it make sense to investigate what those companies are doing that marketing agencies aren’t? Why not look at the culture of the marketing and advertising world, and see how it stands against others? Students can learn about digital media strategy and predictive modeling all they want, but if your agency has a number of bad reviews on GlassDoor, you better believe that candidate is looking somewhere else.

I know that there are a few high-profile marketing thought leaders who know that the most valuable capital an agency or marketing department can have is its people. And those agencies and companies are doing well.

The marketing industry does itself a major injustice when advocacy groups like the ANA croon this ‘disconnect’ study, and then proves its own point by refusing to look internally. There’s a reason why the average CMO tenure is two years. There’s a reason why marketing professionals have the lowest morale when it comes to advocating their own profession.

Conclusion

It is clear that the academic world needs to revamp how it teaches marketing and advertising. It requires a lean-model of marketing education, where trends and thoughts in the current landscape can be adjusted to teaching real-time. What does that look like? I’m not sure. It is also true that students of marketing advertising need to look for opportunities to see what industry professionals do in reality, and seek ways to adopt those practices so they can be ready for the real world. And finally, the marketing industry needs to realize that there are other ways these young professionals can use their talents. They are searching for brands and agencies that will fit their value system. Complain if you must, but figuring out a way to recruit and retain them can no longer be a rhetorical exercise.

Michael Farmer. MediaBiz Villages, September 27, 2017.

ANA was brave to issue a “scathing report” (per AdAge) on the lack of talent in the advertising industry. Certain outsiders were fingered as contributing to the talent problem: universities that “aren’t keeping pace with the industry’s changing needs” and consultancies and tech giants that are offering “more generous salaries and perks.” (Shame on them!) On top of this, Millennials remain an enigma — why aren’t they more eager to enter the industry? What ANA did not describe were the day-to-day operations of advertisers and agencies that have turned the advertising working environment into a relatively unattractive one for job-seeking graduates, a trend that has been in swing and gaining momentum for the past 15 years. Blame the universities and consultancies if you will, but advertisers and agencies need to take personal responsibility for some of the industry’s talent crises.

Before I proceed further, some full disclosure: For nearly two decades, I was a strategy consultant with The Boston Consulting Group and a Director of Bain & Company. During the more recent 25 years, I have been consulting to ad agencies and their clients (as Farmer & Co.) and I have observed a deterioration in agency-advertiser working relationships that is a clear source, in my view, of the talent problem. I recently wrote a book about this — Madison Avenue Manslaughter: An Inside View of Fee-Cutting Clients, Profit-Hungry Owners and Declining Ad Agencies. Finally, I was invited to teach at The City College of New York (CCNY) in an ambitious and up-to-date program that prepares Millennial graduate students for careers in Branding and Integrated Communications (BIC). So, in a sense, I have personally checked all the boxes covered by the ANA report: the universities, the consulting firms and the Millennials.

BIC students who complete internships at agencies during their course of study often report that agency people are overworked and understaffed; that they are under various types of pressures if not abuse from clients (who seem to be prepared to change agencies at the drop of a hat); that they carry out a lot of unplanned work; that agency people are relatively underpaid compared to their colleagues at Bain, Deloitte, Accenture, etc., and that they work with people who see career progression as a difficult question. Industry surveys of agency morale come to the same conclusions. Furthermore, if students were initially interested in the advertising industry to solve brand strategy and growth problems, they see too little of this in their internship agencies.

What they experience is an agency machine that cranks out huge volumes of deliverables by relatively cheerful and energetic agency people on short deadlines to meet client needs. Despite this, all of our students do their best to enter the industry that they prepared for, although agency jobs are few and far between. Agencies are not growing.

The contrast with the consulting firms could not be more vivid. Although consultants work hard and put in overtime and weekends, there is a general feeling that “our work adds value and my contributions are appreciated.” All you need to do is read Glassdoor.com reviews of consulting firms and ad agencies to see the contrast. Differences in salary levels are not to be sniffed at. A graduate entering an ad agency may earn $35-40,000 with no bonus; a consulting firm will pay $65-75,000 plus a signing bonus of $20,000 and a guaranteed first-year bonus of another $15-20,000. It only goes up from there.

The talent gap is real, and the gap is understandable as a long-term outcome of agency-advertiser working relationships that are less than desirable. Agencies need to up their game and help clients improve brand performance; advertisers need to treat agencies with respect and engage them seriously as long-term partners to deal with brand problems. Both sides need to see their individual and joint contributions as “winning” rather than “failing.” It will take money to make this right, but in today’s cost-cutting, procurement-led relationships, it’s not clear where the money will come from. With current trends, agencies will remain underfunded suppliers who cannot afford to hire and retain the kind of talent they need. And the talent gap will only widen.

This doesn’t let the universities off the hook. There is unquestionably high variability with the quality and breadth of advertising expertise among university faculties across the country. This is a difficult problem. Those who have practiced marketing and advertising and are now teaching, teach what they practiced and knew — probably from another era. Textbooks woefully lag reality. The principle of “academic freedom” permits teachers to teach what they wish, without much supervision. So, there may be a double problem — inadequately prepared students with out-of-date information who might end up working in suboptimal agency-advertiser relationships.

ANA’s Pathways 2020 initiative to deepen ties with universities is a great step. The industry can only benefit from closer ties between current practitioners and those who teach. Next in line is the need for ANA and 4As to examine honestly the current nature of agency-advertiser relationships, whose many dysfunctions contribute so importantly to the industry’s deepening talent crisis.

WARC, September 22, 2017.

Clients and agencies face a major “talent disconnect” as millennials look to other industries that they perceive as being more attractive to pursue their careers, a study from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) has warned.

The research, entitled “Bridging the Talent Disconnect: Charting the Pathways to Future Growth,” was commissioned by the ANA Educational Foundation (AEF), a division of the ANA, and conducted by research firm GfK.

“Marketers, and the agencies that work with them, are facing an unprecedented talent challenge, or ‘talent disconnect’, as millennials look to other, seemingly more appealing fields to build careers,” the study asserted. (For more details, read WARC’s in-depth report: ANA identifies “crisis” of young advertising talent.)

“This is driven in large measure by a lack of common vision, vocabulary, and perceived relevance among marketers, young professionals, and the schools that are expected to educate them.”

In reaching this conclusion, the AEF investigation drew on the views of the three main stakeholder groups making up the talent pipeline: students and new hires, academics, and practitioners in the industry.

Based on these insights, it indicated that agencies will struggle to engage the type of smart, savvy, digital native who can help them tackle the seismic shifts currently reshaping the communications industry.

“Our research suggests that there are multiple disconnects – skills, hiring and retention, and expectations – that threaten to erode the talent development ecosystem,” the AEF report said.

In identifying the reasons for the industry’s problems in colleges, the analysis pointed to courses that often lag behind the dynamic industry reality, and a frustration among employers that students are not more ready for actual jobs.

On their part, the widespread habit of brands and agencies of only hiring staff as needed, rather than having set graduate recruitment policies, undermined their chance of in securing the best prospects – especially when coupled with low pay.

“This channels many students away from either industry and into more structured programs like banking, consulting, and technology because, they need more security to pay off students loans or placate nervous parents,” the study said.

Among the study’s other recommendations were that the industry must endeavour to enhance its reputation. “Overall, there is a negative bias toward the professions of marketing and advertising today,” the study said.

“That lingering perception carries over to the student population, which is looking for more purpose in what they want to do and don’t often put marketing and advertising into their consideration set.”

In starting to address these concerns, the ANA/AEF have launched Pathways 2020, which seeks to deepen the bond between academics and practitioners, give the industry a greater presence on campus, and offer more opportunities for students.