Nick Bailey, creative director at AKQA Amsterdam gave an awesome, rousing presentation at Boards Summit Europe this past March. It was part of the fast-paced pecha kucha session “Manifesto: Ideas to Improve the World (of Advertising)”. It was the kind of talk that elicited whoops and hollers from the crowd – a rarity.

So what was he talking about? Not technology or amazing insights in process or innovative creative work. He was talking about the need for more women in the advertising industry. Not having more women in senior creative positions, he said, was not an issue of equality as much as it was an issue of lost opportunity. He did this by showcasing challenging, award-winning and beautiful art by female artists that both mined and transcended gender. As he says in his Input article this issue (pg. 12), “If agencies are missing out on 50% of the world’s creativity, how can we deliver work that’s the best it can be?”

I never expected that kind of missive when I gave the brief “come up with one idea that will make the industry better” to speakers. Yet I, along with the rest of the audience, was gobsmacked and awakened.
The issue of gender is a funny thing in this day and age. There’s a sense that we’ve come so far in gender equality that you don’t really think about it until someone makes a point of it or you’re told to think about it. Like this issue, where we make an issue about the state of women directors in the industry. For the nine years I’ve been at Boards the amount – or rather dearth – of women in top directorial positions has been a perennial topic. The problem has always been one of what to say. To write about an ongoing problem with no hook, no timely reason to address it, it becomes a story just for the sake of it.

Until Kathryn Bigelow won the Oscar, that is.

You see, we know there are faint few women getting the awesome boards or leading creative departments in this industry. Women produce, right? We also know that we don’t cover a lot of women in our features on top and new directors. We know.

But it’s not for a lack of trying. As a reflection of the industry – which is how we, in part, see our brand – it’s hard to elevate women when they’re not getting the same opportunities in the first place.

So with Bigelow’s win as the catalyst, we’ve chosen to address this issue of the lack of women directors with a roundtable conversation with directors and EPs. We’ve also invited Nick Bailey to write an op-ed on this dynamic within agencies. We didn’t, however, put a token woman on our list of top directors, which is simply chosen based on the best directorial work of the year, because tokenism won’t achieve anything. Instead we take this chance (some might say opportunistic, we say timely and topical) to hopefully facilitate a conversation.

It’s not about equal opportunity or quotas. It’s not about feminism or any other ism. It’s about, as Nick says, mining the deepest possible pool of creative potential. It’s about being as progressive as so many in this industry purport to be by forgoing gender stereotypes in favor of pure talent. It’s about understanding – and acting on – the fact that women like beer too, and y’know, can probably direct or write a pretty awesome beer spot.

Cheers,
Rae Ann Fera, Editor