The ‘Mad Men’ Era Is Long Over. Why Is Advertising Still So White?

Melvin DeBerry was working at a steel mill in Memphis when he heard about a program aimed at helping Black people with creative skills develop advertising portfolios. He is now an art director for a large tech firm.

Last summer, KFC ran advertisements in Canada featuring Black people eating fried chicken and licking their fingers, their faces reflected in unused silverware.

Critics called the images racist, but the campaign was not canceled. Instead, it was submitted this spring for a prestigious industry award in New York.

Nate Nichols, the founder and creative director of Palette Group, a creative agency in Brooklyn, was one of the few Black members of the panel of judges reviewing submissions.

“My genuine response is sadness,” Mr. Nichols said. “It just means not enough of us have been able to make it into the room.”

The ad did not win, and KFC Global did not respond to requests for comment. But the episode was emblematic of a multibillion-dollar advertising industry that in at least one way still resembles the “Mad Men” era of the 1960s — namely, its lack of racial diversity.

That dearth, according to a new report, is keenly evident in New York City, the heart of the industry and also the largest advertising market in the United States. The disconnect could be costly at a time when shifts in media consumption favor younger, more diverse audiences.

“Our essence, our creativity is wanted, but we are not,” said Adrienne Lucas, the head of diversity, equity and inclusion at the One Club for Creativity, an industry trade group in New York.

There is also a need, as unemployment rates in New York City for people of color remain stubbornly high, for more diversity in an industry that pays above-average salaries, is expected to keep growing and requires relatively little formal training.

Of nearly 70,000 advertising employees in New York at the end of last year, less than 8 percent were Black, about 11 percent were Asian and under 15 percent were Latino, according to a report released on Monday by the Center for an Urban Future, a public policy research organization that seeks to increase economic mobility. Over 58 percent of employees were women, most of them white. The figures made advertising among the city’s least diverse industries in the city,

Expressions of Black culture are everywhere in advertising, even when few people of color are working behind the scenes to create them, said Adrienne Lucas, the head of diversity, equity and inclusion at the One Club for Creativity, an industry trade group in New York.

Joel Rodriguez, an executive director with the firm Translation, seemed to be headed toward following in his father’s footsteps as a building superintendent. An internship changed that.

“Our essence, our creativity is wanted, but we are not,” she said.

In other ways, the business is rapidly changing.

By 2028, money spent on advertising in the United States could surpass $500 billion, a record, largely because of growth in digital media, said Paul Verna, a vice president of content for Emarketer, a market research firm.

Internet search ads, primarily on Google, have long been the biggest spending category. But social media, including sponsorships on TikTok and Instagram, is rapidly growing, and is attracting a younger demographic, Mr. Verna said.

Even the stretch of Madison Avenue that once defined the industry has lost some of its luster, as more firms move to trendy areas of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The shift has brands and ad agencies focused on younger, more diverse audiences, even as their board rooms remain largely white.

Splashy diversity efforts in the industry in 2021, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent wave of racial justice protests, have stalled or reversed, according to a 2023 survey of over 100 agencies by the 4As, a national trade association.

White executives owned or ran roughly three out of every four agencies in 2021, the survey found. By the next year, the figure had jumped to nine in 10. A significant share of the industry is controlled by six major holding companies, including WPP and Publicis Groupe, that together own hundreds of agencies.

The report does not offer an explanation for the drop in nonwhite ad professionals, but found that 64 percent of Black employees had spent two years or less at their current agency, the shortest tenure of any racial or ethnic group.

Industry experts said the explanation was simple: a lack of career growth opportunities for people of color.

“There’ll be a lot of fake ‘we’re doing something about it,’ and as soon as the cycle dissipates, they go back to what they are — companies run by white men,” said Steve Stoute, the chief executive and founder of Translation, a Black-owned ad firm in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood.

People of color who do find a seat at creative meetings are often the lone voices of dissent in challenging culturally insensitive ideas, said Kai Deveraux Lawson, the head of culture and marketing at Valerie, a creative agency.

“Just because you have a Black or brown person in the room, and I personally have been in this situation, doesn’t mean that person has the trust or the empowerment to influence anybody,” she said.

Even when the views of people of color are heeded, the results are mixed, said Mr. Nichols, 36, of Palette Group.

“You’re being looked at as the monolith for your community, and that’s a very heavy burden to hold,” he said.

Jody-Ann Crooks, 35, who works in health care advertising, grew up in Jamaica. She recalled a past job when an executive asked her if Black people use coal or gas grills.

“All eyes were on me and, first of all, ‘What did this man just ask me?’” she said. “It’s lonely and isolating.”

Critics attribute some recent examples of racial insensitivity to a lack of representation.

In 2017, Pepsi pulled an ad that featured Kendall Jenner, a white woman, handing a can of soda to a police officer, amid cheerful protesters with signs that read “Join the conversation.” Critics panned the ad for trivializing the Black Lives Matter movement and police violence.

But advertising’s lack of diversity is also a work force problem, said Jonathan Bowles, the Center for an Urban Future’s executive director.

“There are a lot of jobs that are growing in New York, but not many that have good wages,” he said. He pointed to the explosive expansion of the home health care sector, which employs a large number of women of color but pays close to minimum wage.

Jobs that dwindled during the pandemic in sectors like retail have disproportionately affected people of color. The Black unemployment rate in New York City was nearly 8 percent in the year’s first quarter, compared with 3.3 percent for white workers, according to the city’s Economic Development Corporation.

That makes advertising an industry with big growth potential for people of color, Mr. Bowles said. In New York City, the median annual income in advertising is about $92,000, while the citywide private sector median income is $55,000, he said.

And job growth in the industry has been brisk. Despite a wave of layoffs during the pandemic, mostly in tech-related sectors, the advertising work force has grown nearly 50 percent in the past two decades, from 46,700 jobs in 2003 to 69,800 in 2023, far outpacing the private sector’s 37 percent job growth in the same period.

“Most people don’t know jobs like this exist,” said Melvin DeBerry, 37, an art director for a large tech firm’s ad department in Manhattan.

Last year, Mr. DeBerry was working at a steel mill in Memphis when he heard from a friend about the One School, a free program started in 2020 to help Black creatives build an advertising portfolio. A former aspiring musician, he was accepted to the four-month virtual program and attended classes two nights a week after work. He said his new salary tops $100,000, the most he has ever earned.

Hiring people from varied backgrounds is crucial to the industry’s growth, said Joel Rodriguez, 36, an executive director with the creative firm Translation.

“It’s not just in terms of skin color,” he said. “It’s diversity of thought,”

Some of his group’s recent work includes a campaign for AT&T and its high-tech helmets for college football players who are deaf or hard of hearing, and a well-received short film for the headphone brand Beats by Dre. The film asked: “You love Black culture, but do you love me?”

His career could have gone differently. Mr. Rodriguez grew up in an apartment building in Flushing, Queens, where his father, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic, was the superintendent. While studying marketing in college, Mr. Rodriguez worked as a janitor to pay his bills.

As graduation approached, he had no job prospects and considered applying to become the super at a new building near his home. But he had a cousin who was a chauffeur for Mr. Stoute of Translation. Mr. Rodriguez asked his cousin to slip his résumé to human resources.

The move earned him his first internship. Absent that opportunity, he said, he would have followed in his father’s career footsteps.

“Without that exposure,” Mr. Rodriguez said, “all we know is what we see.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.