Some of advertising's top brass got a reprieve this September. In March, a number of executives were subpoenaed by the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which was planning a very public and potentially humiliating hearing on diversity hiring practices, to take place during Advertising Week in New York. That ugly bullet was dodged when an agreement was reached to create goals in diversity hiring - but not before igniting a conversation on racial inequity within advertising.

Unfortunately, the Commission's concern that minorities are not being well represented within agencies is impossible to deny. Just go to Cannes or any industry-related function and tell me you aren't blinded by the white.

Part of the agreement that staved off the Commission's investigation requires agencies to scrutinize their own hiring practices. But to me, that's only part of the issue. What happens when there aren't that many qualified candidates from various ethnicities?

The New York Times Magazine recently ran an advertorial entitled Diversity in Advertising, which included what I thought to be a startling fact: Of the 1,277 students surveyed by the American Advertising Federation's Academic Committee, 81% were Caucasian. 81%! From there, 6.4% were Asian-American, 5% were Hispanic and a meager 3.4% were African-American.

How can agencies be expected to ensure a culturally diverse workforce when that workforce doesn't exist? Should the industry be more mindful of the fact that all great copywriters aren't 25-year-old white males with impeccable taste in sneakers? Absolutely. But should the conversation dwell solely on how to fix the problem from inside? No.

Getting back to Advertising Week, I was speaking with Rick Boyko, managing director of the VCU Adcenter at the week's opening party. He'd just come from an inner city school where he was giving a presentation on advertising as a potential career path. Many of the students, he said, didn't even consider the wild world of commercials, and they seemed genuinely excited by this new prospect. Similarly, another conversation I had this week revolved around Brooklyn Workforce Innovations, which has a program, Made in New York, that trains inner city youth to become producers and then lobbies the production community to hire them.

To think that a problem as complex, emotional and politically charged as racial equality can be solved with a hearing, public wrist slaps or a bit of forced navel-gazing is naïve. The industry as a whole has to figure out why it's not seen as appealing for diverse talents, why it's still viewed by many as an old boys club, and find ways to exact real change. It'd be all the better for it.

Cheers
Rae Ann Fera
Editor