This article first appeared in the latest edition of AdNews magazine (13 November). Click here to subscribe to the AdNews magazine or read the iPad edition here.
The rhetoric of the last few days has been dominated by gender diversity. I for one am very glad it's in the headlines.
While the issue that Pippa talks about here, and those that I raised in an online column last week, come down to gender diversity, there are also bigger diversity issues the ad industry is facing.
Compared with the racial diversity and the age demographic of the Australian population, adland (as well as across the media), is sharply out of focus.
To stretch the point, the industry is made up of young (ish) white middle-class men who live in metro areas, making ads that appeal to other young (ish) white middleclass men who live in metro areas. That is not very reflective. I'm being facetious. Yes, there are non-young, non-middle-class, non-white, non-males in this industry, but let's roll with it. Very broadly speaking, the advertising and media industry lives in a bubble.
It's a great bubble to be a part of but it means that we are skewed in what we see, what we experience and what appeals, and therefore skewed in what is created.
I know that personally, I've rarely been in real-world Australia. I've been up and down the NSW coast and I've been to Wagga Wagga. I've also been to Mudgie, but largely I spent my time there in pubs. I moved from London, where I lived in a similar Soho/East London adland bubble, to Sydney where I live in a Surry Hills adland bubble. It's great, but it's not real. Not everyone is a hip young thing with just the right amount of beard.
Australia, like most developed nations, has an ageing population. But there are not many older people in this game giving a perspective, which is why any ads that seem to be targeting the over 50s portray them as frail and elderly on the brink of death and only interested in products for old people like life insurance, or stair-lifts, or easy peel satsumas for arthritic hands. We know that’s not the reality of 50 year olds.
TV shows have very little racial diversity. Ads have very little racial diversity. And I'm not just talking about the token Asian or black woman tossed in as an attempt to tick the female and ethnic boxes. If you go to the suburbs, small towns and cities, there is a great deal more diversity than tends to be depicted.
What's also not real is the culture of long hours that mean people are spending less and less time in the real world actually interacting with real people. If as a creative, or media planning team you are in the office from 9am to midnight every day for two weeks working on a pitch, where are you getting your perspective for your ideas from? What is your strategy based on? It's certainly not based on real life, real events happening out there in pubs, bars, communities, supermarkets or RSLs.
That's where the real people are – and that is who you're advertising to. Let's get real and burst the bubble.