Deadly Sin #7 - Our Failed DEI Efforts

You were the chosen one! It was said you would destroy the Sith, not join them!

Last week, I took the week off.  Not just because deliverables are heating up at work, but also because this week’s Digital Deadly Sins is a tough one to write.

It’s because we’ve reached the seventh and last of Digital Marketing’s Seven Deadly Sins, and it’s a tough one to talk about because the overwhelming majority of us in the business are guilty of perpetuating it, and we have absolutely no excuse.

Any regrets?

Years ago, I found myself standing next to a dear friend, looking over a crowd at an event we put together.  It was one of the first IRL gatherings of the Internet Old Timers.  This was a group I had founded as something of a joke.

Old Timers was an email list I had started in 2000 in order to promote high-level discussion of the issues within the nascent digital media space.  The joke was that our emergent business had been in existence for five years at best.  Therefore, it should have no established senior people – Old Timers - in it.

Still, there was value in talking to someone who had three years’ worth of digital media experience over someone who was just getting into the business and learning the ropes.  So I started an email list to start to pull together people who had gotten into the business by the end of 1996.

Why is it so homogeneous in here?

The event I was attending was one of our first off-list gatherings at a venue in New York.  My dear friend was telling me I should be proud of having put together such a great group – and I was.  Still, the thought that I couldn’t banish from my mind as I looked out over the crowd of people drinking and having fun was this – Their faces were overwhelmingly white and male.

I didn’t dwell on it again until I was on the train home that evening, but I remember thinking our crowd shouldn’t be so lacking in diversity.  I’m from Long Island, a place that has racism literally built into its DNA, and I felt like I saw more black and brown faces at my local supermarket than I did at a gathering of digital media professionals.

Which is exactly the opposite of what one would expect.

You had one job…

The Internet was supposed to level playing fields.  It was supposed to erase the advantages of the established and privileged by hitting the reset button on entrenched media interests, while it connected people and communities that hadn’t been connected before.  Why, then, when I went to conferences and got together with other industry execs, did it always seem like I was looking out over a sea of people who were overwhelmingly white and male?

It's been a journey in my thinking about it.  When I had just started my ad career after graduating from one of the most conservative schools in the country, I had convinced myself that underrepresented groups just didn’t apply for the jobs in advertising in the numbers that would even things out.  That was an easy way to avoid thinking about it.  It was easier to avoid thinking about institutional biases, privilege and outreach to underrepresented groups.  I like to think I’ve evolved a bit since then.

What became obvious to me as I moved on in my career was that diversity, equity and inclusion efforts need to be active, not passive.  We have to put in the effort to include people from marginalized groups, not make half-assed efforts to remove some of the barriers to inclusion and wait for it to happen on its own.

Why is this one of the original sins of the digital ad biz?

But what makes diversity failures an original sin of the digital marketing business?

It’s because we had a unique opportunity. 

We were disrupting the status quo anyway.  We were undermining the institutions that had dominated the media landscape for years and creating new opportunities for people who wanted to teach themselves emerging technology.  We should have used that opportunity to actively pull in people from marginalized groups, and we didn’t.

Those opportunities come along once in a generation – if we’re lucky.  And we squandered ours.

After all the disruption and the reforming of the media business, after all the digital buyouts of the offline behemoths – what do we have to show for it?  An ad business that’s more homogeneous in its makeup, but one that has certainly learned to make its products – content and advertising – tap into underrepresented communities.  The Forbes article I linked above calls that cultural exploitation and I agree.

We could turn this around if we want to. We continue to disrupt and do away with the old guard.  Let’s learn from the big mistake we made and be more actively inclusive going forward.