Claire Beale on Advertising: Adland has a real image problem

(Fallon)

Adland, they say, is like a pint of Guinness. The nearer you get to the top, the whiter it becomes. Really, an advertising stout is mostly foam.

According to the latest ad industry census from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, just over 8 per cent of the ad business is composed of non-white employees. That's some way better than the in 2007 census, when the figure was less than 6 per cent. But it's still not good enough.

The race issue really rubs because of what's happening on Madison Avenue right now. Barack Obama has already put race on the US political agenda. Now ethnic diversity is about to become a legal battle for the country's ad industry. In fact, activists reckon the industry hasn't haven't changed much since the late 1950s. When Nat King Cole's TV show was scrapped in 1957 because the broadcaster couldn't find a sponsor, the star accused Madison Avenue of being "afraid of the dark".

Flip to 2009, and a report from the law company Mehri & Skalet arguing that "pervasive racial discrimination" still infects American agencies. Black graduates, the report says, earn 20 per cent less than their white colleagues and are only 10 per cent as likely to have a salary of more than $100,000.

Now, you need to know that the firm's Cyrus Mehri is one of America's most feared civil rights lawyers. And now he's vowed to take on the advertising industry to "end the era of purposeful discrimination".

You might wonder why he's singling out adland. Well, as Mehri points out, advertising it is not only one of the most influential industries in American society, shaping hearts and minds and influencing the way people think. He reckons it is also the most entrenched of all industries when it comes to equal opportunity – a closed society where favouritism rules the day and meritocracy is cast aside.

For decades, Mehri says, the US ad industry has robbed African-Americans not just of equal opportunities but also of their dignity. Nat King Cole might have said adland was afraid of the dark, but Mehri warns that Madison Avenue should now be afraid of the light his company is going to shine on it.

This is incredibly explosive stuff, and has had US ad execs up in Armani, damning the report as "hysterical". Still, there's no evidence that Madison Avenue agencies mirror even the country's ethnic profile, which is 25 per cent non-white. It seem increasingly certain that the US ad industry will face a class-action lawsuit, and the big US-dominated multinationals may well end up enshrining diversity requirements in hiring practices.

Should British agencies be worried about these events? Clearly, there's a diversity issue in this country, too. If US-based clients are pressured into demanding that their agencies become more diverse, that attitude will spread to the UK as well. It's certainly on the radar of the Central Office of Information, the division that handles all the Government's advertising.

Crucial to addressing the problem will be finding new ways to attract talent from ethnic groups – something that the industry has struggled with on both sides of the Atlantic. Poor starting salaries and few black role models in top jobs means that advertising has often lost out to other careers in the battle for the brightest graduates. Unlike medicine or law, advertising simply isn't seen as an aspirational career in some cultures.

That is a serious image problem, one that is exacerbating the lack of diversity. It's chicken and egg, of course: the more successful ad execs from ethnic backgrounds, the more advertising might be seen as a positive career choice among non-whites. Until then, advertising will continue to be shunned by those it most desperately needs to attract.

Best in show: Cadbury (Fallon)

*I adore this ad. The follow-up to the wonderful Cadbury Dairy Milk gorilla, and the not so wonderful 'Trucks', it's utterly delightful and fantastically engaging.

It's beautifully simple, too. A pair of superbly cast kids groove their eyebrows to the Freestyle track "Don't Stop the Rock", and it's genuinely hilarious – you want to wallow in it over and over.

By the way, don't go thinking there's some clever CGI giving those eyebrows lift-off. Just some sticky tape, string and a couple of puppeteers. Ouch.