Ben Jones, Creative / Photography by Agenda
When Sherry asked me to write a piece for her, my first reply was, “What do you want me to write about?”
She reminded me that way back, when I started working in the advertising world, my first creative partner was a brilliant Art Director, and person of colour, called Tony Hector.
While it wasn’t completely unusual to have a mixed-race team in the 1990s, it certainly wasn’t the norm either. It was at Saatchi & Saatchi and from memory there were only two other people of colour working in what was a huge creative department at the time, Ajab and Noel.
Sherry having to remind me of all this is probably indicative of how I looked upon it back then and now. It never even crossed my mind.
I subsequently ran an agency, worked as a Director and a CD and an ECD. I chose and worked with people based on their creativity and what they bought to the party, their good attitude to hard work and their enthusiasm.
But, can I honestly say that in 30 years of working across advertising, PR, production, events and directing, that the make-up of the agencies I worked at and ran, and the events, productions and shoots I have overseen, could truly be seen as culturally diverse? The answer would be a resounding no.
Am I at fault for this? In some senses yes and in some senses no. I chose people to work with that were the right people for what I needed. There were very few (or no) people of colour who applied for the jobs I had to fill, or who worked on the crews or teams that I hired.
So what happened and what was the issue?
When I started lecturing for D&AD and at universities and schools about what I did, and what the world of advertising was like, it was pretty apparent that 99 per cent of the people I was talking to were White and male.
I suspect that hasn’t changed that much and this is what we really need to address.
I was hired into my first ever creative role as a writer by the legendary Saatchi & Saatchi Art Director, Paul Arden, because I had some amazing jazz posters on my wall, in the art buying department, and loved music. He told me that I was an experiment for him, to see how someone with no advertising training would write ads. He believed in bringing other things and people into your thinking, to truly develop more interesting and different work.
I have lived by that for the whole of my career and have always believed that it is only when you have a diverse culture that you get the best debate and thinking.
When I founded my agency, Cake, I had a very definite idea of how creative should be run. We didn’t have a creative department, because I believed that creativity can, and should, come from as many of our team as possible.
We hired people because we thought they brought something interesting and had a point of view. Our recruitment policy stretched from people we met at gigs to band bookers for festivals. We just looked for people with passion and an interest in what we were trying to do.
Having these differing points of view and diversity in thinking made Cake successful.
Our job moving forward is to make sure we are encouraging those that still aren’t represented within our industry to join us and be part of it. By bringing their experiences and thinking to the table, we are not only more representative of the world today, but we’re also adding more voices to create even better work.
