CHANGING THE FACE
An initiative that aims to creatively represent diversity in Australian advertising agencies through data.
BRIEF TO BROADCAST
As a successful applicant of D&AD's New Blood Workshop, I was chosen, along with 30 young creatives across Australia and New Zealand, to take part in an intensive one day workshop held at The Glue Society in Sydney.
The brief on the day was to create a campaign that pushed the creative industry, especially those in senior positions, to think seriously about diversity in the workplace and ultimately change the way they hire. Changing The Face was the winning idea and as a result, Jonathan Kneebone from Glue Society and Tim Lindsay from D&AD funded our idea.
CREATING THE FACE
To create the campaign, we invited Executive Creative Directors from across Australia to commit to change by uploading a headshot. From here, we compiled the images to create the one face - the face of advertising.
The initiative picked up momentum and the industry took notice.
THE LAUNCH
To reveal ‘the face’ we hosted an event at Glue Society’s warehouse in 2019. Here, we had guest speakers like Esther Clerehan and Jenny Mak, who covered topics of gender diversity and unconscious bias in the creative industry.
The image was powerful and sparked and sparked conversation, after conversation.
ADNEWS FRONT COVER
Diversity is much more than just gender, so in phase two we opened the initiative up for all creative agencies to participate - no matter your position or department. Here, we will create the face of each agency which will be used as a tool year-on-year.
Today, the initiative has received industry-wide support and is backed by AdNews and Microsoft.
BROWN RIOT PODCAST
In a wide-ranging discussion, Jasmine and I sat down with Coffee Cocoa Gunpowder creative partner Ant Melder and talked about the inspiration behind the initiative and what we hoped to achieve. The podcast covers topics including being seen as ‘a female team’, unconscious bias, and the diversity imbalance between junior and senior creatives.
This initiative is still ongoing, our hope is to get as many agencies to participate as possible.