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OG Marketing Brew readers know about 600 & Rising, #CommitToChange, and Hold the PRess—diversity and inclusion initiatives that held the spotlight during the marketing industry’s reckoning with the Black Lives Matter movement.
Today, we’re adding another initiative to that list: The A Pledge.
The deets: “The pledge is an effort to challenge the Atlanta advertising and marketing community to match the diversity of their team to that of Atlanta by 2030,” Tawanda Carlton, an account executive at already-pledged agency Media Frenzy Global, told Marketing Brew.
Lack of workforce diversity indicates ongoing racial inequality—in both Atlanta and the marketing industry as a whole.
- Atlanta’s current population = 62% people of color and 38% white.
- The U.S. marketing industry = “86.1% white, 6.1% African American, 5.6% Asian American and 8.9% Hispanic American,” per Bureau of Labor and Statistics data shared by Ad Age.
Big picture: “While our city’s demographics will inevitably shift over time, the point of this pursuit is to acknowledge the disparity in the advertising and marketing industry—and, more importantly, to take real, measurable actions to correct it,” Pledge co-founder Jeff Hilimire told Ad Age.