In early 2005, I had the honor of being invited to speak on a panel of OMMA West out in San Francisco. While I had spoken at several events before, most were located here in the Washington, DC area. Smaller focused conferences, often about the use of the internet in the political arena. This one was different. Much larger and more broad based. And more influential. So a special thanks for that goes out to David Berkowitz for bringing me in to speak. This was a breakaway panel on blogging. Jeremy Pepper sat on it as well.
These larger events can be electric. They’re filled with energetic people who are on the forefront of strategic marketing communications and/or the technology that will make it all possible. The atmosphere is definitely optimistic. Just like the posts I see in today’s blogs and the mini-conversations on Twitter.
That attitude was never more obvious when we all piled into the larger room (about 400 of us or more) for one of the major sessions. Four top speakers, visionaries all. In a phrase, rock stars. Huge screen. Each equipped with their own mike. Giving us their views on the future and how, essentially, we’d be leading it in some way. We would be the ones who would create the strategic methodologies of marketing communication, entertainment, and news delivery. Yes, yes, that will be us.
I began to look throughout the audience of hundreds of heads nodding in agreement and then realized something that troubled me.
There wasn’t one black person in the room.
This took me back to about a year and a half earlier to a one-day seminar held at the National Press Club here in DC. This one was about the internet and politics and the future of political communication. 150 people sitting down for lunch. The only black guy was an employee of the Press Club who was handling the AV equipment.
I don’t blame the organizers of these events at all by the way. But it does reflect a greater problem. A problem that’s often overlooked or disgrarded.
Now, a year ago, a major controversy erupted on Madison Avenue. It seems that minorities were is such short supply that different governmental agencies were going to take a deeper look into the hiring practices. I followed some of the commentaries on it and it typically broke down into statistical comparisons of percentages of minorities living in the New York City area as it relates to the ad industry on the left vs. the “let the market decide” attitude on the right. Both arguments to me are old and accomplish nothing, only causing both sides to dig in their heels more. But this is a longstanding issue in advertising that hasn’t gone away.
For the record, I’ve long felt that the ad industry isn’t diverse enough. Not just race either. It’s my guess that most of the people that are heavily involved in the ad industry think the same way, vote the same way, and are demographically similar. To an extent that’s the way it turns out, because people often hire in their own image to reaffirm their own sense of self and that their own beliefs and own world views are the most valid. If one doesn’t match that, then it can get real tough.
That can be dangerous thing when it comes to how we all get our marketing messages, our news…the information that we need to live by. In its most basic mode, it’s, to me, the major reason why so many think that today’s advertising sucks. It’s not just that media habits are changing…they are of course, but it’s because so often ads (think beer ads, car ads, etc.) are so similar to one another. And that may well be because the people creating them are so similar to one another. And they may think that we all think just like them. That’s because that’s all they see in their world view.
A recent event drove this home a bit more. Here in Northern Virginia, there was a conference that got great reviews. The New New Internet Web 2.0. I couldn’t attend it but I was shocked to here of a certain statistic. 60 speakers. 57 men. 3 women.
Wow.
Now part of that can be explained away as this area is heavily technology/engineering oriented. Less social oriented. I think it was Geoff Livingston that said that you could tell it was Washington because everyone was in a suit. But a 19 to 1 ratio is ridiculous. The surprising thing is that the people who did the nuts and bolts of putting together were women. I know a few of them and they’re great people. I’m not blaming them. But shit.
Back to my original point. The future of communication and who’s leading it. Let’s take a look at social media. We are all saying that this is the future of communication. Of marketing. Of entertainment. Of news delivery. Only now it is more personal. We must “engage” the customer/member/community/viewer. On their terms. But do we know enough and can we relate enough to our increasingly diverse nation…or for that matter the sphere of influence that spans borders and oceans? Can or will we be able to understand that media usage can be quite different amongst divergent demographic groups? Will we accept this or will we resist, hoping that the methodologies that we’ll be creating are working for a lot of people who don’t “look like us”?
Or will we still be a bunch of heads nodding in agreement that we are the future of communication?
A special thanks to Susan Getgood for being the inspiration for this article.
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