I currently work in two industries, technology and advertising, where I believe there is a strong appetite for diversity, but where there are also old habits that hold back progress. As Google’s CMO, I know it’s my job to help change this reality.
Last year, I shared some of our learnings . Since then, we’ve made significant progress, but, like many in the industry, our journey is ongoing.
Let’s take our creative work as an example. Based on the creative reviews we’ve done over the past year, I’ve seen more diversity in our casts.
There was some truth to this. For a while, we audited our work through manual reviews and machine learning .
Screen time for women in our workplace is up 48% this year
The age of the people appearing in our ads increasingly reflects the general population.
And 23% of our American ad consumers are black.
But I wasn’t looking at the bigger picture . It turns cashapp database out we were mostly casting lighter-skinned people and a disproportionate amount of interracial couples. Even as we began to include more skin tones, we were often doing so in stereotypical roles. One in three depictions of black people was limited to dance, music or sports.
I realized that we had been looking at diversity only through the broadest categories : women, LGBTQ, black, Latinx, etc. But you have to look beyond the physical. Identity is nuanced. There is diversity within diversity.
To fix this, we need to change habits. But can this be creating 3d models from photos achieved on a large scale? How do we change the habits of our teams and agencies? We still have a lot to learn, but there are nine practical tips that we find useful:
1. Make sure everyone feels responsible
Too often, we relied on women and people of color to point out diversity issues they identified in our work. But this can’t be up to them alone. Now, our core diversity team is made up of senior leaders, regardless of race, gender, or orientation. And we made cyprus business directory it their responsibility to correct their personal biases.
2. Partner with agencies that care about inclusion
Most of our creative is produced by our partner agencies, so it’s important that we work with agencies that are genuinely interested in inclusion.
We’ve compiled a list of agencies that excel at this. We recently reached out to our top 70 agency partners and asked them to share their representation statistics. My team and I will be meeting with their CEOs to discuss their diversity plans and learn from each other.