Australian advertising, PR, and communication agencies are failing to “walk the walk” when it comes to cultural diversity, according to new research.
The Framework for Agency Inclusion (FAIR) report, released by the Scanlon Foundation and communication agency Think HQ, found high awareness but limited knowledge and inconsistent practices when it comes to building cultural diversity in agency workforces and campaigns among Australian communications agencies.
The report examined the cultural makeup of the industry’s workforce and perceptions and practices around cultural diversity through in-depth interviews with senior agency leaders in Australia’s advertising, PR and communication agencies and a national online survey open to agency staff at all levels.
According to the report, nearly three quarters of Australian communications agencies don’t regularly recommend their clients consider culturally and linguistically diverse audiences, with only 25.8% of respondents saying their agencies do so even ‘some of the time’.
The report also indicated respondents were overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic at 82%, compared to 58% of the Australian population, and only half, 49.6%, said their agency had a diversity and inclusion policy.
“Despite great awareness of the importance of diversity and almost universal agreement the industry needs to do more, the fact that half of agency workplaces don’t have a D&I policy reflects a stark gap between awareness, rhetoric and practice,” says Think HQ founder and managing director Jen Sharpe.
The report was led by RMIT Honorary University Fellow Dr Marianne D. Sison and is the first of a series of annual reports that aims to benchmark and track diversity over time.
The report also found that 43% of respondents said client briefs only sometimes required engaging with multicultural audiences. Meanwhile, 21% said their agency always proactively recommended engagement with multicultural audiences in client briefs but only 25.8% did so ‘some’ of the time.
The majority of the one in four born overseas were from other Anglo-Celtic countries, UK, USA, New Zealand, Ireland and South Africa, representing 12% of the total, with another 3% European. Just 3% of respondents were Indigenous Australians.
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