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As city reveals minority goals, Mad Ave. giants start recruitment drives
TALL, TANNED, silver-haired and distinctly WASP-y, Bill Gray, coCEO of Ogilvy North America, is not exactly the person you'd expect to lead advertising's charge to attract and retain minorities.
But since New York City's Commission on Human Rights ended its investigation of Ogilvy and 15 other New York ad agencies, Mr. Gray has become an evangelist for diversity hiring. He has to be: Ogilvy and its brethren are under more pressure than ever after the commission last week released agencies' goals for minority hires in 2007 (see table). Mr. Gray's targets? For new hires at executive level, 16% must be minority. For general new hires, 33% must be minority.
There is still some fuzziness around these targets. First, it's impossible to know how percentages will translate into human beings because agencies can't predict how many people they'll hire (or lay off) in a given year-that hinges on the winning or losing of business. Moreover, the definition of "minority" has been left up to each agency. One executive said the definition at his shop is "nonwhite," meaning that white women won't count toward the goal. But that won't be enough to appease critics who claim the bulk of minority hires will be Asians and Latinos, with African-Americans still lagging behind.
Still, even with the potential for different interpretations of the targets, they make the agencies accountable for diversity hiring and have many shops panicking about how they're going to make their numbers, a task they say is particularly challenging at the executive level where their poor hiring record is coming back to haunt them.
Realizing that this is now serious enough business to require a structural as well as cultural shift, Mr. Gray has taken several steps to make sure Ogilvy isn't left behind. One tactic he is employing to ensure that its senior employees champion diversity consistently: tying attainment of corporate-diversity goals to performance reviews and pay. "You've got to ask leaders to make it a priority," said Mr. Gray. (Draft-FCB is doing the...