July 9th 2020

What does a woman have to do to get onto an advertising jury?

A new campaign to support the Gerety Awards shines a spotlight on the need to improve representation on award show juries.

Nicola Kemp

Editorial Director Creativebrief

A new campaign to support the Gerety Awards shines a spotlight on the need to improve representation on award show juries. The campaign features creative female leaders from across the globe, sporting purple moustaches, posing the question: “What does a woman have to do to get onto an advertising jury?”

The campaign comes at a pivotal time for the industry when it comes to addressing representation, with barely a week going by without an event or media owner being called-out for a lack of representation in their line-ups or marketing materials.

"There are still award shows where the jury is composed of less than 20% female jurors," said the Gerety Awards' Founder Lucía Ongay. "This reinforces our purpose and call for entries campaign, but it also begs the question: if Gerety can have a 100% female jury, why can’t others at least try to get to 50/50?"

Sometimes, mocking the status quo is the best way to change it.
Svetlana Copic

Increasingly female leaders are placing personal accountability front and centre with their approach to judging panels, pushing organisations to ensure greater representation on juries they are asked to take part in. However, this approach is not without its challenges as one senior media leader shared that the response from an event organiser to such a request last year was, “We asked all the women”.

This lack of representation matters, not only because judging award shows is a vital tool both for networking and education, but also because without diverse representation, advertising award shows risk simply rewarding work which maintains the status quo, rather than work which reflects society as a whole.

Svetlana Copic, Founder of No Agency, which created the campaign for Gerety, added: "As a festival with the unique approach to gender equality, Gerety Awards had both the credibility and the courage to turn its call for entries into something much bigger. After decades of the 'one girl in the jury' situation, change has finally started to happen, but this is just the beginning and we need to keep the conversation going. Sometimes, mocking the status quo is the best way to change it."

The Gerety Awards were named after Frances Gerety, the copywriter who first coined the slogan ‘A diamond is forever’. The deadline for this year’s awards is midnight Paris time on Friday 17^th July.

Visit the Gerety Awards website to find out more.

Change the ratio: The BITE guide to improving representation in advertising juries

If you are still asking ‘Is he a name?’ when putting together, or putting people forward for juries, you are asking the wrong question.
Take greater accountability. Event organisers need to actively make diverse representation on juries a KPI of any event. If you don’t measure it you don’t value it. Individuals across the industry also need to take greater accountability for what events they choose to support and actively ask what the representation of the jury they are agreeing to judge is.
Be organised. By placing diversity at the forefront, you won’t be asking creative women to drop everything at a day’s notice to judge.
Be creative. Judging panels are a brilliant opportunity for creative women on maternity leave to immerse themselves in the work as a keeping-in-touch day. Event organisers and organisations alike can support this approach by being flexible and accommodating.
If you get called out for appearing on a non-diverse jury as an event organiser or individual, listen and consider the feedback you receive. Act on it; don’t retreat into defensiveness.