Direct

Growing up on the East coast, Tori went to college in North Carolina where she was persuaded to pursue a degree in food science in exchange for a full ride. Eventually, she added on an English degree and after graduating she went on to an advertising portfolio school in Minnesota to focus on copywriting. After ad school, Tori jumped right into the booming Minneapolis ad industry.

Once Tori started her career in advertising, she found that she was treated fairly. “It could be racial because I feel like black people in general are more direct. Being a black woman who was raised on the East coast, I’m very direct and I speak up for myself so in meetings I feel like I’m usually heard,” Tori says. She has also been lucky to have great bosses who have encouraged her to speak out and if any concerns come up, to talk to them openly.

With that said, Tori gets a sense that people in the industry think men are funnier than women when it comes to writing. People have a stereotypical mindset that boxes women into working on beauty and fashion brands, as if that’s all they understand. “Women can be funny. Women are very funny,” Tori says.

Age Is a

Number

Tori thinks one of the biggest problems in the advertising industry is ageism. She says, “Advertising is a young person’s game because it’s all about knowing what’s hip and current. Who knows that better than young people?

Looking at genders, ageism targets one more than the other. Tori said, “I’m seeing plenty of executive creative directors and chief creative officers that are older men. It seems like once women get to a certain age in advertising, they’re no longer desirable, nobody will hire them. I don’t know why because we’re talking about really intelligent, smart, talented people. See how many women above the age of 40 or 45 are at agencies. I bet the numbers will be smaller than the number of women in leadership.”

While it’s difficult to determine the cause, ageism is another hurdle for women to overcome in order to secure a long-lasting creative leadership position.

Balance

Another flaw in the structure of advertising is the lack of balance for parents. Between having to be available during the standard workday, creative leaders also must be available every other hour to respond to client demands. Sometimes that means working until three in the morning. Add in little human beings that you have to care for and your time gets eaten up by work.

“I talk to my friends that work in plenty of other industries and they say, ‘oh we have flexible work hours so that’s not an issue’ or ‘we have summer hours’ or ‘we have a very family friendly work life balance policy so they let us job share or they let me work at home a couple days a week’. I don’t feel like the industry we have now has to be set up the way it is. I think it could be more parent friendly but it hasn’t been before and people are too lazy to figure out how to make it that way,” Tori says.

Tori points out that since women often become moms and moms traditionally take on the child rearing role more than dads, it would be a huge advancement for women, as well as parents alike, if work-life balance policies were implemented. This kind of thinking might encourage more women to pursue creative leadership roles in advertising, knowing they’d be able to have a balanced schedule.

Diversity

& Inclusion

With everything that goes on in the advertising industry, Heidi turns to other women going through similar experiences. “There’s a new culture of work wives which I didn’t experience until the last couple of years,” Heidi says. Women peers can be crazy competitive with each other. Instead of creating an aggressive environment, women should be coming together and collaborating. Work wives provide that supportive environment both inside and outside of the office.

Mentoring is another way that Heidi works to make a difference for women in the ad world. In previous years, she saw her mentorship role as one that just provided feedback and pushed her mentees work. Today, Heidi notices that she’s not only helping mentees with their projects but now it’s also about assisting them as they navigate difficult work situations.

Fierce &

Female

With over 12 years of experience, Haley has built her career at a variety of advertising agencies. At each company, she has noticed that most of the leadership team has been male. While the ratio is skewed, Haley has always felt that she had a voice.

Haley’s fierce, straightforward nature has helped her be aggressive and grab any opportunity presented to her. No person, gender or societal norm holds her back from excelling. “As a woman, I never think of myself as a woman. I’m just thinking of me as a person in a role and what the best thing to do is.”

The gender divide is something that Haley refuses to alter herself for. “As a woman, I don’t think I need to do a certain thing differently because I’m a woman,” Haley says. She has a frame of mind that gives her an objective outlook, rather than a subjective one. This outlook shapes how she works as a creative leader and allows her to see beyond the gender disparities.

A Cool

Culture

From ping-pong tables to beer on tap, advertising agencies have a reputation for creating fun, hip environments. Pair that with a more relaxed, nonchalant work culture and a fine line is created between what’s ok to joke about and what’s not ok. Haley has witnessed this line crossed by high executives. Often taking place outside of work hours, at a happy hour or other work-related function, the vibe is even more casual. Poorly versed jokes and comments that objectify women are casually tossed around.

“There are times I’ve felt uncomfortable to collaborate on the jokes. There are times, I shamefully have to say, that I’ve collaborated on the jokes just to gain more trust. Sometimes I’ll laugh off the joke. Sometimes I’ll say no, that’s not ok,” Haley says. Often, her reaction depends on the person making the comment or joke. Imagine wanting to call out your boss for a poorly worded joke; it’s a tricky situation to navigate.

Dedication

Many artists share a similar fear; that their work isn’t good enough. Haley is one of those artists. However, she says, “If the majority of the people think your work is good, let go of the thought that you need to keep working on it.” There’s something to be said about continuously working to become a better artist but obsessing over work can be harmful and cause creatives to burn out.

With that said, Haley believes that women do have to speak up and work harder to prove themselves as creatives and leaders. Haley says, “The industry itself isn’t going to change if women don’t stand up and speak for themselves. The women in the industry need to come together and own their voice and take the responsibility back.” Just the right amount of dedication, hard work and rallying is needed to find a necessary balance.

Good

Work

In advertising, success is all about making money from good work. The creatives behind that work have a different idea of what success means to them. For Haley, success is having her work recognized; not in the sense of award recognition but in a way that sparks people’s interest. “Success is your creativity getting recognized and having people approach you to collaborate with because you have a certain style, a certain way of seeing the world.”

Haley also finds success through mentorship. “As a young designer you go out and learn. Eventually you come to a path where you’re not receiving anymore mentorship and then you realize that it’s time to give back to young designers. Knowing you spent so much time learning and now you find your way to teach other people through mentoring; that is success. It’s an accumulation of knowledge, power and creativity and being able to give back to a company and community.”

The Future

Haley’s ready to leave the advertising industry. She says this is her last year before she wants to try something new. “I think diversity in life is important. I’ve learned a lot but I want to be in the health and fitness industry. Whatever that may mean. I’m going back to grad school and learning a couple new skills to have more knowledge so I can try something else. In five years, I might be someone who owns a gym or someone who is a sports psychologist or out helping people feel better about their health; I don’t know what position that will be,” Haley says.

In the next ten years, Haley wants to reach even further. “Eventually I want to help people in countries where there’s no justice and where there’s a lot of discrimination toward women; places where people just don’t have freedom. I want to help them be physically strong and build confidence because I think that’s what helps strengthen their minds.”

Haley has always been one to try something new and explore. She says, “Before design, I was in the food industry. I owned restaurants where I was working on wedding and event coordination. In every industry you learn a new skill set and you can use all the skills you learn from each industry to work towards something you really care about. For me, that’s helping communities. I think our country needs to have more generosity towards each other. There’s a lot of take.”

Hissy Fit

Being a creative leader involves finding the balance between being respected, so people listen to you, and providing critique, so the creative work is top notch. People go about finding, or not finding, that balance in different ways.

One day, Carrie was talking with her co-workers about production horror stories and mean creative directors. One of her more junior co-workers talked about a creative director he worked with who would tear creative’s work off the wall, enforce late nights and yell at his creative team. Carrie says, “You can have high expectations [of creative work] without throwing a fit and you can be respectful to people without throwing a fit.”

There seems to be a sweeping generalization in the industry that it’s ok for men to come in and tear things in half. Carrie doesn’t think that’s the way to go about providing feedback, nor would she feel comfortable acting in that manner. “I think I’m seen as nicer here [at work] than other people, although here [in Minnesota] everyone is nice. I have felt like I should yell or pound my fists more but that’s not who I am so I feel like I’ve always gotten what I wanted through negotiation and earning respect from other people. If men lose their temper, people will still react. If I lose my temper, people will think I’m a bitch,” she says.

A Tale of

Two Times

Carrie started her career in a digital design agency as the only creative woman. Today, she has been at her current agency for seven years, with no plans to leave. At her first agency, she was exposed to big parties involving a lot of inappropriate behavior; a lot of drinking and co-worker relationships hooking up. She questions if that was just the particular agency environment or if that’s just what happened during those times. Now, with groups like MeToo, Carrie doesn’t see as much inappropriate behavior because it’s no longer accepted.

“It’s a different world. I notice with younger women at work that they don’t have tolerance for things that used to be tolerated. I was talking to our executive creative director, who is an older woman from New York, about how my generation of women and above, if they couldn’t dish it back or hang in that environment, they wouldn’t continue in advertising. If you didn’t have thick skin, you would leave because it would be too uncomfortable. It’s not that the women who stayed wanted to be in those situations, they just kept their mouths shut and would deal with it. Now women in their early and mid-twenties will raise a flag on things. They have a little more of a floor to say those things whereas before it would have been ignored,” Carrie says.

Nowhere

but Up

Google, Apple and IBM are among many top tier companies dropping the requirement that job applicants need to have a college degree. They’re opening their doors up to a much larger and diverse group of people. There are a lot of improvements that the ad industry could make to improve the field. Carrie thinks one improvement could be dropping the requirement for a portfolio, making the field a lot more accessible to different kinds of people, pointing out that portfolio schools are expensive and take a lot of time. Carrie is all for making the industry more inclusive but notes dropping the portfolio requirement might be a double-edged sword because having the skill to create work, especially quick work, is vital.

Agencies that focus on teaching its people might be the solution. Carrie says, “The biggest thing is just making space to teach people. If you’re thrown on a campaign and expected to come up with ideas but you’ve never been trained on how to do that, you would immediately not be chosen for the next project. In the agency world, you’re only as good as your last project. If you do well, you get the next big project and if you don’t you stay stagnant where you are. It’s not as easy as just saying lets hire more diverse people. Space and time are needed to mentor people.”

How to Be

a Leader

Listen. Carrie says one of the most important skills you need as a leader is to be a good listener. Creative directors oversee the entire creative part of the business. Practicality is a necessity and that comes from listening to what the client needs. Carrie says, “You can’t walk into a client meeting and say you want to do CGI [computer generate imagery] and we’re going to get Beyoncé and she’s going to sing a Beatles songs.” Creatives are taught to think big so that’s ok to do but creative directors need to reign the ideas in to find the right solution for the client and brand. Carrie thinks the worst thing that can happen to a creative director is to get to a creative review meeting and all the ideas don’t work. “You have to be open, listen and be approachable so teams run ideas through you before reviews so you can mold them,” Carrie says. Sometimes that means crushing dreams and making a creative team start from scratch, which sucks but that’s the job.

Altering

Growing up in an upper middle-class neighborhood in Texas and going to underperforming schools, Helen felt that from a young age she had to alter herself. As she excelled in middle and high school, she felt the need to constantly prove herself. Unspoken expectations from teachers were forced upon her because of the way she looked and dressed. “I always felt this need to be even smarter and try to say, ‘you don’t know who I am’ and I’m going to be even smarter than you think to make you stop treating me and anyone else in this way,” Helen says.

These experiences of having to become a certain person to meet the expectations of others has made Helen less inclined to change herself now, which she sees as a benefit. “I still sometimes make people a little uncomfortable by not being what people expect. To be a female, Hispanic person in the creative industry in Minnesota, it sometimes throws people off their game. I’ve learned to appreciate that and use it more as a tool than a detriment,” she says.

As a creative director, Helen doesn’t alter herself in any way. Drawing on her design background, she remains objective around the office by emphasizing the need for her creative team to have sound reasoning for the choices they make in their work. She has found that this kind of approach avoids perceptions of bitchy-ness and gets the job done.

One-Way

Promos

Promotions are given to well-deserving employees, but Helen finds that men are benefiting from these advancements more than women. Helen notices a pattern with companies enforcing this idea that women must prove themselves to get a promotion. “I had a friend tell me that men get promoted for their potential and women get promoted for their performance. That’s so true,” she says.

Trial periods are a result of this thinking. Women often receive a trial period where they’re given all the responsibilities and work of the higher role, but they don’t collect the title or the money. Meanwhile, men are just getting the promotion, no trial necessary. Why does this happen? “I think it’s because there are as many men as there are in roles at a higher level, there isn’t as much awareness about what that bias or discrimination looks like,” Helen says.

Cha-Ching

When Helen was interviewing for her current job, she received an official offer when she was home with her family. The salary wasn’t what she requested. Her younger brother, who at the time had never held a real job, told her to write back and tell the company the amount she wanted or she would walk. “I said, I can’t do that. And he said, yes you can. That blew my mind; that my younger brother naturally had that in him to ask for what you want. I was terrified of the idea. I didn’t even know why I thought I couldn’t do it,” Helen explains. She did counter-offer and eventually accepted the position.

Salaries are a taboo topic. It’s understandable since they’re a personal matter but without starting a discussion, it’s hard to create change. After a promotion, Helen approached a male co-worker at the same level and asked if he’d be comfortable sharing his salary. He wasn’t. “I was curious if that discrepancy we all know about and are aware of but not wanting to believe that it exists, is real. Him not telling me his salary, made me think even more so that maybe I was right. I wish we could talk about it more openly, especially across gender,” Helen says.

Start the

Convos

Twelve years ago, Helen never considered the advertising industry as one she would work in. It didn’t occur to her that someone was designing the menus at restaurants or their branding; simple things we cross paths with every day. No one ever talked to her about that kind of work as a career path. To make this industry more diverse and inclusive, it starts with making all kinds of people aware of this industry as a job. That conversation should start early but that doesn’t mean it is.

Helen points out that this industry is so precious about someone’s background being related to the industry. The issue is that, like Helen, everybody becomes aware of things at different times. A lot of people never know what they want to do and are constantly growing and changing so much that there’s no single point in a person’s life where the figure it out entirely.

The thing about the creative industry is that people can be taught how to make an ad or design a logo. “If you’re a critical thinker and you’re curious and you can express an idea well, we need to open ourselves up to those kinds of people who don’t follow the path that we were all told we needed to follow,” Helen explains.

Leaders

Listen

It’s not the first time we’ve heard this. Listening is an important skill in all parts of life. “Make the time to listen. We’re inherently all really, really, really busy and as I’ve become more of a manager, I take the time to make sure I’m meeting with the people I’m managing, at minimum once every two weeks to just check in and say what’s up,” Helen says.

Empathy is another must-have skill for creative leaders. According to Helen, “It’s important to be able to step back and put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Acknowledge that how you see things, is not how someone else does. Listen to others and try to understand how they’re experiencing something.”

As a leader, Helen has stays optimistic and works in the right mindset to be successful. “One thing I like to point out with fellow creatives and younger ones, is that we’re all allowed that one day or hour to be pissed and to feel like someone ruined your work or everything sucks, no one is smart and this work is stupid. You can have that but tomorrow, you have to come back here and do it anyway, even if it is stupid and it’s not the way you would do it,” Helen says. It’s all about making the best of everything and not attaching an excess amount of worth to a project.

Hyper-

Aware

When Lydia started her career, gender discrimination and sexual harassment were major cultural talking points. At times, the stories being discussed did relate to her own experiences. However, Lydia wondered if this dialogue was helpful because it did give her pause as she started her career. She notes that these discussions are important but the extreme awareness amplifies the differences between men and women because they are in fact, different. As a result, Lydia sees women and employers becoming hyperaware, which has its good and bad sides.

“I think stopping to examine yourself as a woman, it’s hard work and it’s good work to do but it is emotionally difficult and it can lead you to be hyperaware of when you’re discriminated against. That can make it hard to build the confidence you really need,” Lydia says.

It’s important to acknowledge right versus wrong but being hyperaware can cause people to focus too much of their energy on a single concern. If your energy is focused on one thing, it’s being taken away from, for example, making career strides. Lydia is big proponent of talking about these issues but it’s a difficult balance between bringing attention to them and causing a hyperawareness.

Evolution

Although the advertising industry still has its issues, Lydia notices that things are changing and the dialogue is evolving. “When I came into advertising, if you were a woman you had to come in with guns blazing, you had to be confident, and you had to show you could make it in a man’s world,” Lydia says. Nowadays things are slowly becoming more inclusive, aware and evolved to a point where Lydia notices male colleagues who are well versed in women’s issues and can have a discussion with her about them.

Lydia notices younger adults entering the business are even more progressive and interesting. LGBTQ issues, for example, were not a talking point when Lydia started her career. At the time, same-sex marriage still wasn’t legalized. “Now people are declaring pronouns and that’s part of what goes on business cards. Those issues are key, not just to women but diversity of all genders and backgrounds,” Lydia says.

The industry is still evolving and there’s a lot advertising needs to do to catch-up but things are happening and parts are moving.

R-E-S-P-

E-C-T

Early on in her career, Lydia interacted with clients a lot. Lydia was twenty-two years old and didn’t have a fancy high-level job title. Now that she’s older with a cool title, she notices a shift in how clients treat her. In the beginning, she was treated as if she was the little sister who was just there. The clients wouldn’t address questions to her and presumed they had no commonalities. This treatment was seen with creatives at different agencies too. Big male hot shots with cool titles would treat her in a way that implied they were higher up, thus more important. The respect was non-existent.

In order to gain the respect she wanted, Lydia developed thick skin. “I used to do martial arts. I was always getting kicked and punched and screamed at by my coach. That gave me thick skin to the point where going in to a meeting at work, where everyone doesn’t like your work, isn’t that big of a deal. Martial arts gave me perspective,” Lydia explains. She gives a lot of credit to her sports training and imagines that a lot of other successful women probably had some sports background that helped them grow the necessary thick skin to excel.

Societal

Setbacks

Lydia pinpoints a few flaws in our society that may contribute to the lack of female leaders. The United States might just have the worst maternity/paternity policy in the world. As a result, women feel like they can’t take the time off work that they need. The government should implement policies that work to uphold families better. This could help women not feel like they must make a choice between having a family or a career; the two should work together instead of sacrificing one for the other.

Health insurance is another area of concern. Adjusting the structure of health insurance could help give people the freedom to choose a better suited career. The life in an ad agency has some major flaws and isn’t for everyone. Nowadays, a lot of women opt to freelance because the dynamic of agencies wasn’t a good fit. Freelance also provides a lot of flexibility. With that said, health insurance for those who opt to freelance is concerning. When Lydia quit to freelance for a period of time, she was on Obamacare. The first year it cost her $207/month. Not bad. The following year it rose to $400/month. Financially, freelancing didn’t make sense anymore. Lydia says, “With the healthcare policies happening right now and a lot of women in this field freelancing, it shoots them in the foot financially.” It’s time for the government to play their part and step up.

Change is

Coming

And it’s coming in the form of Generation Z. You might hate them, you might love them or you might be one of them. Regardless of your stance, they’re starting to enter the workforce and they’re here to stay.

“The next generation after Millennials [Gen Z] are really fascinating people. They demand a lot from everyone in power. They demand a lot of conscientiousness of people, about the planet and about corporate ethics. I think that’s going to reshape advertising in an interesting way. It’s already started with Millennials a little bit. My whole message is to pay attention to young people because they generally want good things to happen,” Lydia says.

The

Journey

Kelsey Collins is a creative director with a copywriting background. Wrapping up her 38th year in the ad industry, Kelsey has seen it all. Before her current position, she worked in small and large agencies alike. To get to where she is today, Kelsey had to maneuver a few speed bumps. During the 2010 recession, she was laid off from her role as vice president & creative director at a large Minneapolis agency. The only way she could get a job was by taking a lower level role as a senior copywriter. On top of that, Kelsey says, “It was really hard to find a job as a 50-year-old woman in a youth-oriented business.”

Today, Kelsey works as a writer for one of the largest companies in Minnesota: Target Corporation. Working at Target is Kelsey’s first job outside of an advertising agency. She couldn’t be happier. “I didn’t know if I would like it [corporate creative] but I love it. Regular hours. Great creative. It has a very different vibe from agencies. I can’t tell you how great it is to have the weekend. To look forward to the weekend and realize they don’t expect you to work on the weekends. At agencies, you never knew when you had the weekend off.”

Check

Yourself

When Kelsey was a senior copywriter at an agency, they brought in a male copywriter at the same level. She had been at the agency for many years so the company tasked her with helping guide him and they changed her title to senior copywriter and supervisor. The guy she was supervising was a great writer but didn’t have the skills for advertising writing; everything he wrote was too long. Kelsey spent a lot of time coaching and teaching him.

This was during the days of paper paychecks so people would come around on payday and hand deliver the checks. One day, Kelsey saw this co-worker receive his check, tear off the top to go cash it, and drop his pay stub on the floor. “It was right there, I didn’t even have to search. I saw he was getting paid $8,000 more than me and I was supervising him.”

After this discovery, Kelsey went to her boss, questioning why she was getting paid less when she was his boss. Her boss told her that he was a better negotiator. Furious, Kelsey went out, got a job offer elsewhere and confronted her boss about this offer which came with a $20,000 raise. Her boss said he’d match it. Match it? Kelsey was taken aback. No, she demanded more. Within a week she accepted a $22,000 raise, kept her current job and used her boss’s words against him to make a mind-blowing point.

Visibility

At most of her jobs, Kelsey was paired with a female partner. There was a lot of pressure that they felt to work harder and be more prepared than their male counterparts. They saw a lot of the men get away with laziness; something that if they did, wouldn’t get shrugged off in the same way. At one point, a work project required various creative partners to prepare concepts over the weekend. The creative men refused to work but Kelsey and her partner worked the weekend, as directed to, and came in prepared with solid, strategically sound concepts. The men had nothing to show. Kelsey learned that the entire team had to start the project over because the men complained to the president and creative director. The men didn’t see Kelsey and her partner as equals to them so because Kelsey had a creative solution, there must have been something wrong with the initial project ask. Their thinking was that the girl team couldn’t have solved it.

“I used to get assigned to girl projects. I would never get assigned to anything they considered masculine. Although they could put men on our Famous Footwear client, when most of the people who buy shoes are women,” Kelsey says. The hard part is that when you’re assigned to projects men aren’t interested in and the men make up a large part of the leadership team, your projects are less important and you become less visible in the agency. It can be a downward spiral from there.

Seat at

the Table

Is there such a thing as a bad seat at the table? Yes, yes there is. On various occasions, Kelsey would get called into meetings where a creative team would be working on a new business pitch for a potential client. When she asked the team if she was working on the new creative for the pitch, the group told her no, they just needed her in the meeting. Why? They wanted to represent a more diverse company to the prospective client. Kelsey had a seat at the table but it was there for all the wrong reasons. Her agency just wanted a woman at the table to show the clients the team wasn’t a group of all the same kinds of dudes. The agency thought, “What could we do to make this group more interesting?” Unfortunately, the answer was to bring in a woman to sit on the sidelines.

Ballsy

Women

Having worked in the industry for thirty-eight years and counting, Kelsey has seen several changes in the ad industry. Now, she is seeing a shift in the young people entering the ad world. Millennials are making their mark in the workforce. Kelsey is from the Boomer generation where they followed the rules to a T. If their boss asked them to be at work all day during normal business hours then come in to work the weekend, they did it without question. Millennials don’t stand for that and they’re making it clear. “More ballsy women are coming in. I think that’s awesome,” Kelsey says.