As recently as a decade ago, there were few women in important roles in ad agencies. Men were always in the leadership roles. Men did the hiring and men were running the agencies. But women have made strides of late. There is parity representation in account management; they outnumber men in media and in strategic planning.
Most notably, there’s a surge in appointments of new female leaders at the local/lead offices of top agencies in New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Almost all the major agencies promoted women to head these outfits in the last couple of years.
What’s behind the sudden string of female appointments after years of discrimination against women? Is this a long overdue recognition of women’s leadership or just tokenism? Or perhaps both?
Women’s inability to crack the glass ceiling on Madison Avenue for many years is indefensible. Is this being rectified now? Women compose 52% of the population, so it is just a natural that agency leadership should be more balanced. Except, it is not. The pendulum swung completely to the other side. Women now account for all the promotions, and run all key offices. This development, a new glass ceiling, this time for men, baffled me . It seems dogma over merit.
Having talked to many agency CEOs about the recent trend, all admitted that the sudden promotions of women aren’t coincidental.
The force that is changing Madison Avenue is the advertisers, or specifically the boards . When boards started becoming more diverse and recruited female directors about a decade and a half ago, they began putting pressure on the CEO to hire more women for the company. Many of the new recruits entered the company through the marketing department.
Today 56% of all CMOs, are women. This is up from 47% in 2020 and from 23% in 2016. This is a game-changing moment for agencies because the CMO hires the agency.
Should the gender of the person who hires the agency matter to agencies? As an agency pitch consultant who works closely with female CMOs, I can confirm that I was never asked by a female CMO to approach a pitch that we manage with partiality toward any group.
But the change in the CMO makeup leads agencies assume that replication is a safer course of action. The agency CEOs with whom I spoke admitted that, while women are promoted on merit, balancing their teams to create better chemistry with female CMOs when pitching is a factor.
Yet, in truth, promoting more women to run offices is just a façade. It’s cosmetic and the advertising business still continues to be male-dominated where it matters the most.
The holding companies will likely claim that half of their employees are women and that 40% of the executive positions are held by them. However, there isn’t even one single woman CEO of any of the six major holding companies. They, the ad conglomerates that control 75% of ad spending and own hundreds of agencies are a “Boys Club.” It’s hard to believe that in the 21st Century the group that wields absolute power in the ad industry lacks any diversity.
That extends itself to the next layer below. Only a sole woman runs one of the 15 global agency networks that report to the holding companies. And even that a recent development, in the lat couple of years.
Promoting women to run local office is long overdue. But women still lack real influence in the industry because the real strategic decisions are made exclusively by men who run the holding companies, for better or for worse..
So, to summarize, women had made some progress, yes, but the gender gap is what matters the most, power and influence, remains very real. More than half a century after the “Mad Men” era on Madison Avenue, gender bias continues, even as more women are promoted today.
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