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Advertising must do more to attract employees from ethnic backgrounds to the business, according to senior industry executives. Their comments follow the release of the sixth ‘Race for Opportunity’ benchmarking report.

Ethnic minorities make up 8% of the UK population. But despite a ‘mushrooming’ of ethnic faces fronting advertising campaigns, there is still a dearth of non-white talent coming into the industry. The report shows the proportion of people from ethnic minorities who have reached the top of Race for Opportunity’s 104 member organizations is tiny. Just 4% of Lloyds TSB’s management team, the country’s top performer according to the report, are non-white.

As for the advertising industry, the figures are slowly climbing. The IPA’s (Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) 2005 Agency Census found out that non-white employees make up 6,9% of the workforce, up from 5,1% in 2004 and 6,2% a year earlier. Simon Marshall, chief executive at Publicis Dialog says there’s ‘a trickle of more candidates coming through, but it is no flood’. He adds that many of these candidates are applying for back-room functions such as IT. ‘The proportion of candidates that we see from ethnic minorities isn’t good enough explaining why advertising isn’t attracting more non-whites. You would expect diversity to be more natural, but if you look at agencies that is not the case. It is worrying that this is not right on top of our agenda.’

Trevor Robinson, who chairs the IPA’s Diversity Committee, says ethnic diversity is ultimately a matter of good business practice. ‘If you give agencies good financial reasons why they should have a more diverse client base and workforce, they will do it.’

Source: Marketing Week