Can Australian creative women ever be good enough?

Campaign Brief’s recent list of top creatives in Australia and New Zealand included only one woman. People are outraged, asking how this could happen in 2024.

I know why. I was there on the day it started—16 May 1996.

We started COW (Creative Opportunities for Women), and the industry-backed initiative was launched that day with the article above. The article clearly shows that creative women dominated the 1995 awards, and that list doesn’t even include Mara Marich and Sarah Barclay’s 1995 People’s Choice Award for the best ad from the last 20 years for Antz Pantz.

COW was a revolution. For the first time ever, all the women in advertising creative departments could come together. We knew of each other, but we didn’t really know each other. Generally, we replaced each other in the latest creative director merry-go-round. Every agency had a couple of female creative teams, but if we weren’t to a new creative director’s taste, our headhunters would gently suggest a move.

COW’s first event filled a large restaurant with female creatives. I wanted to share with all of them the most precious thing I had ever received in my career—a legendary female mentor. I had started my career in London, where our equivalent of Award School had giants reviewing our work each week: Charles Saatchi, Dave Trott, David Abbott, and best of all, Barbara Nokes. She’s famous for writing Levi’s "Launderette," an ad so iconic that Beyoncé recently paid homage to it. Even though Madeleine Albright had yet to say, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women,” Barbara lived that sentiment and was always there for the few of us trying to break in.

In the third decade of her career, Barbara gave her first-ever speech to a room full of female creatives. She was as moved as we were. We thought female creativity was finally starting to make its mark, and there was hope that the younger women in the room wouldn’t have it as tough as we did.

How wrong we were.

It seems the men had let a lot of women into Australian creative departments, expecting us to fail because they genuinely believed we weren’t as good as them. When we proved them wrong, they simply stopped giving us opportunities. Within a couple of years, many of us senior women had either lost our careers, or our headhunters had sent us off to glittering success overseas. This broke their hearts. 

One reason there were so many successful creative women was the relentless efforts of two women: Esther Clerehan and Gerri Dibsdall, who fought for us and demanded equal rights, equal pay, deserved promotions, and some damn respect! In 1996, they were disempowered too but never gave up the fight for female creative careers. The love Esther receives from women in advertising to this day is testament to that.

Gerri was the headhunter who brought out promising newcomers from London. When she approached me, she said she wanted to be the headhunter to place the first female creative director in Sydney.

Imagine how hard it was for her to sit opposite Jane Caro and me nine years later and tell us, “The boys have decided there will never be a female creative director, so you may as well forget about it.” She wasn’t being complicit; the person who put the boot into our careers had screwed her royally too. Her husband left her the moment she landed him the CD job that, in a fair world, would have been mine (Jane didn’t want that role; she had bigger plans, as the AM after her name now demonstrates).

I knew I had a real shot at the job nine months earlier when we went for a briefing for Drive washing powder at Unilever and met Fran Bayner-Boyle, a fifty-something woman giving out her last brief before retirement. She took one look at Jane and me and said, “This is the first time in my whole career selling to women that I’ve ever had a senior female creative team.” She ripped up the brief and said, “Don’t give me two cunts in a kitchen.”

Not only did we have the freedom of an open brief, but we also had no one stopping us from presenting whatever we wanted. Our Creative Director had mysteriously disappeared and wasn’t replaced until after the campaign aired.

Two strong, opinionated women who had just launched a campaign to industry acclaim and were close to his ex were definitely not to the new guy’s taste. He couldn’t fire us, so he gave the Drive account to the junior team and moved us to an office the size of a broom cupboard. When we won more Australian Television Awards than we could carry, he gave us a 2% pay rise, in line with inflation. But it wasn’t just him who seemed to be against us. The Drive campaign was groundbreaking and funny, but the Award Shows, where the old boys' club wielded their power, only gave us bronze. The campaign was so successful it was remade for OMO around the world. When it came up for judging at Cannes, the South Americans claimed it was a copy of their version. The Australasian jury representative, who damn well knew the truth, kept schtum.

And don’t think we didn’t know what happened in those 100% male jury rooms. In every single one, there were women avoiding that special place in hell, tallying the votes, organising the lunches, massaging egos, and reporting straight to us when the boys fucked us over.

We did get the last laugh on the Drive campaign, watching our new CD squirm when the campaign won the Grand Prix for the best work produced anywhere in the world for Unilever. It’s a big deal—we even got a magnum of champagne from Sir Martin Sorrell, and the head of Unilever Australia dropped all his engagements to fly to London to collect the trophy.

Jane and I were never going to let the old boys' network get us. Jane went to Saatchi’s for a couple of years before the next creative director shuffle saw her launching her fabulous media career. I worked with the greatest of advertising gentlemen at the aptly named Principals, and they paved the way for me to start my own agency. When Jack Vaughan and I created the James Squire beer brand, the Malt Shovel Brewery became my first client. Three years later, my agency made the 2001 Campaign Brief list of most creative agencies in Southeast Asia, the first list I’d ever made—probably because it was based on award wins, not a biased editor’s opinion.

Even though many brilliant senior creative women like us disappeared from Australian agencies, we had trained a lot of really talented up-and-comers, and the old boys' club was starting to lose its power. All hope was not lost.

However, throughout the late 80s and early 90s, a new boys' club was forming, and it was probably the most bizarre phase in Australian advertising history. In 1987, Siimon Reynolds became Creative Director of Grey and instantly became an industry legend with his Grim Reaper AIDS awareness campaign. He was 21 years old.

The luxury of hindsight allows us to recognise that the promotion of a young man to such responsibility may not have been the best idea. At a 2022 NSW Special Commission Inquiry, Brent Mackie of the LGBTQIA+ community organisation ACON said, “As a result of the hysteria whipped up by the Grim Reaper campaign, where many people saw gay men as grim reapers, LGBTQ people, and especially people living with HIV/AIDS, were subjected to increased hate, abuse, and in some cases, increased violence.”

When Siimon got his CD role, EST (Erhard Seminars Training) had a cult-like hold over a large swathe of the creative community. My copywriter and I realised taking the course would boost our careers; however, we discovered the process included revealing past trauma. We were already way too vulnerable as women in a male-dominated industry. There was no way we were going to open up old wounds to further our careers, especially when half the people in the room would be the ones employing us. We spent the money we saved on a week partying on Hamilton Island instead!

These EST-fueled ‘masters of the universe’ started rising through the ranks at a phenomenal rate, and it seemed every agency wanted a wunderkind for their CD. Twenty-five-year-old boys were regularly promoted beyond their experience, many of whom are now forgotten. There was one remarkable exception. Yes, he was über-confident like the rest of them, but David Droga had something else—genius talent. Gerri sent me for an interview with him in 1993. He looked through my book and said, “You are really, really good; you just haven’t found your home yet.” I cried when I left his office. He really believed there was a home for an ambitious and talented female creative. There wasn’t. The old boys' club employed us because they genuinely didn’t believe we could ever be as good as them. The new boys' club was different—they simply didn’t employ us.

The turn of the century brought a new existential threat to female creative careers with the advent of digital, and another set of creative directors arrived. Now, female creatives weren’t just not good enough; we were also not technical enough.

In the 2010s, everyone’s career relied on the number of awards you’d won. By now, there were more women on juries, so the only explanation for the lack of rising female stars is that they simply weren’t given the briefs, opportunities, or promotions.

This was proved in November 2015 when an agency in Sydney boasted of its latest creative hires: five white guys. It was the day the 3% conference finished in New York, and the women in the industry were pretty fired up

Cindy Gallop launched the offensive with a single tweet: "What the fuck were you thinking?" And we launched the Unf**kables. I connected with senior female creatives around the world, took their quotes, and turned them into a social media onslaught. The boys didn’t know what hit them. We had a team working in every time zone, replying to the hate on industry blogs, feeding articles to the press, and using our powerful connections to chat with their clients. Soon, the women in business were standing beside us, and the women in Hollywood were watching, ready to follow our lead to solve the problems in their own industry too.

The agency kept quiet, hoping it would all go away. After a week, they sent out a press release saying they had chosen the best talent available. Yes, they used the same old argument that women creatives weren’t good enough.

And now, here we are nine years later with a Campaign Brief list that says women creatives aren’t good enough.

It’s just not good enough.

It never has been.

__________

Image: Four women in their 30s stand on a roof overlooking the Sydney Skyline.

Caption: Seeing red, Ms Jane Caro (left) Ms Shortis, Ms Harrington and Ms Evans aim to shatter the glass ceiling. Photo: Kristi Miller.

The Australian 16 May 1996.

Work barriers are bull, says small band of creatives

By KATRINA STRICKLAND

They call themselves Cows and they are out to improve the paltry situation for women copywriters and art directors in Australian advertising agencies.

In this case, however, Cows is an acronym for a new group which has sprung out of the Advertising Federation of Australia — the Creative Opportunities for Women Sub-committee.

The group, headed by creatives Ms Jane Evans from J. Walter Thompson and Ms Helen Shortis from Ogilvy & Mather, will hold a series of lectures in the coming year on women and advertising, conduct research on the state of women in creative departments, and mentor young women trying to break into the industry.

While substantial numbers of women work in the account service and media planning side of the advertising business, their numbers in agency creative departments are paltry.

The AFA has conducted research on how many women are working as art directors and copywriters in Australia but will not release the results for fear of embarrassing its member agencies.

Ms Evans estimates only about 60 female copywriters or art directors work in mainstream advertising agencies in Australia, accounting for between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of agency creatives.

Women who have made it to the top of the creative pile — the creative director’s role — are even harder to find, with the handful of female creative directors tending not to work for the multinationals but instead owning their own shops or working for smaller outfits.

While there is no simple reason why the glass ceiling still exists in creative departments, Ms Evans and her partner at JWT, Ms Jane Caro, have a few theories of their own.

"Up until Award School 10 years ago, the only way into a creative department was through dispatch or if you knew someone, and that basically excluded women,” Ms Caro said.

So why tackle the problem now?

“This is really the first time there have been enough senior women, award winners, to do something about it,” she said.

The subcommittee comprises Ms Evans and Ms Caro, Ms Shortis and her creative partner, Ms Rachel Harrington, together with other senior creatives such as Ms Sue Carey, Ms Georgia Arnott, Ms Julie Rath and Ms Tanya Viskovich.

They point out that women dominated the industry's creative award shows last year, with Ms Evans and Ms Caro winning at the ATV awards, Ms Lynette Chiang winning at Cannes and Caxton, and Ms Georgia Arnott (along with Mr Tim Hall) cleaning up at the Award awards.

Yet, according to Ms Caro, there still exists a perception among some senior agency managers that women do not have the “creative edge” of their male counterparts.

“There’s still a real belief among many that women aren’t good enough, or that girls write girls’ ads,” Ms Caro said.

“And there’s still a belief that men can think like women but women can’t think like men.”

Ms Evans said the imbalance within agencies could be one of the reasons why advertising perpetuated outdated stereotypes.

A recent study by Grey Advertising found 55 per cent of TV commercials represented women as gorgeous, model-like creatures, 18 per cent portrayed them as housewives and 26 per cent showed them preoccupied with their appearance.

“A number of clients are now female and they’re asking where are our female creatives,” Ms Evans said.

“As an industry, we are completely out of touch with how to talk to women, and it shows.

"The advertising industry does not exist to be a cosy little boys' club. Clients want advertising which talks to consumers. They can’t afford to take only one view.”