The $330 billion U.S. advertising industry shortchanges Black shoppers and their $1.6 trillion in spending power at its peril.
In June 2020, just weeks after a white police officer murdered unarmed George Floyd, AdAge obtained an internal memo from Top Five advertising agency Interpublic Group that showed just 2.6% of its executives were Black while 86% were white. Chairman and CEO Michael Roth didn’t need a public shaming to realize the numbers were abysmal. “We can all agree that we MUST do better,” Roth wrote in the memo, according to AdAge.
Since then, advertising firms and marketing departments at consumer-products companies have done better at pushing forward on executive representation. The industry, however, is backsliding in a different, essential way. While non-Hispanic white people comprise 59% of the U.S. population, white actors accounted for 72.5% of people who…
