Codee Mac on why advertising should be heaps gayer

So what’s your superpower, when it comes to Advertising? 

As a queer person, you kind of grow up having to read the room and read the audience. You use a lot of your natural instinct and fight and flight comes into play. I worked out how I needed to act and behave and what character I needed to portray in order to make other people in the room feel comfortable.

Which yes, it’s a traumatic thing to go through growing up. I would not wish it upon anyone. But it has also translated a lot into advertising. It’s given me the ability to know my audience and know what they need. It’s sort of become my superpower.

Now that you are in the position to make monumental changes, what’s next?

I’ve always been an advocate for diversity in the industry. You need authentic storytellers to tell good stories, because if you only have one perspective, where’s the difference? And where’s the creative storytelling? You can’t tell those stories without people that have the stories to tell.

With leaders I’ve had in the past they hire based on cultural fit. I get it, 100%, somebody has to be able to fit in and work with the team. But I think we stumble when we talk about cultural fit, because we become demographically homogeneous.

So how do you define culture? If it’s about having a beer at the end of the day, well, that rules out people that don’t drink. If it’s somebody that's going to come for lunch or dinner, that rules out people with family commitments. What about people from different ethnic backgrounds?

Years ago, I had an old boss. He was talking about two staff members who didn’t really socialise with the team a whole lot and whether they were a cultural fit or not. They were both of Asian descent and to me it was really weird that he was talking about two people who were actually from a different cultural background as not being a cultural fit. So what are you talking about here? What is a cultural fit to you? And if you’re constantly going for a “cultural fit” in that sense, then you’re going to be missing all these people who bring other perspectives and experiences to the table.

It sounds like we need a change in how we talk about “cultural fit” and our mindset around that.

Yes, it’s about meeting in the middle. In the conversation I had with that boss, I said, did you know that those two team members are really into anime? He didn't know that about them. He said, “I had no clue”. To me, it was clear that he hadn’t made any effort to meet them in the middle. By cultural fit, he was saying that they needed to conform to everybody else.

I used to look around and at the end of the day, the guys would go out to the deck and play darts and have chats. All that sort of stuff. And I would sit there thinking that doesn’t really appeal to me. I could see that there were straight male employees getting conversations and opportunities to talk to ECDs, whereas I wasn’t. I’d think to myself, like, do I force myself to go out there and do that? Do I have to conform? Or is that a culture that shouldn’t be happening? It was just a big question mark always around it, where it left other people.

What do you see is the play between cultural fit and us defining what our values are as a business and why we want our employees to share these values?

I never looked at the values as the same sort of thing. That’s what we should be talking about when we say “cultural fit”. For me, those values are about how we relate to each other and work together. It’s a professional thing.

But I don’t think that there is a hard line between how we behave personally and professionally. I think it all blurs together as one. I don’t ever feel there's a switch that I turn off the personal and become professional. How I operate working on jobs or when I’m quiet, it’s still me.

And I think that's really important, that we share values about how we work and interact with people.

You’ve talked about getting face time with senior people and whether they relate to you, and about being a gay man in our industry. Have you had leaders that you’ve worked with who are also gay or on the part of the LGBTQIA+ community?

I’ve had one. I worked with her at a previous agency in Auckland. And that was my first time seeing a queer person in a senior role. As I’ve said, my perception of the ad industry was polar opposite to what it actually was when I started. There were a couple of times where I’d wanted to speak up about diversity in our work, but was too afraid to. Then she came in. She’s very much about championing queer people and diversity in both the business and the work she makes. To have her show up was amazing. It was the reassurance that other queer people in the industry. To see it and know that they were fighting for diversity was really reassuring.

And it was also reassuring on a work level. Sometimes I felt a certain type of work was being made in the industry. I’d think “oh, my work doesn't look like this”, right? But the sort of work that she was creating was queer, it was out there. And it was really awesome to see that. To be able to see somebody the same as me.

She was the person that I would go to to have conversations about being queer in our industry. She was good to have there.

A really good piece of advice that she gave me was: Don’t ever do any activism for your employer, unless they give you a job number or pay you to do it. And that makes sense. For so many years it’s been on LGBTQIA+ people. It's been our responsibility to take our spare time to get acceptance, to get workplaces comfortable with us. But it shouldn’t be that now. It’s gotten to a point where everybody else needs to start putting in the extra work.

It’s an area that a lot of minority groups and minority individuals struggle with daily. We have the experience and people taking advantage of that can be a challenge. We’re happy to have the conversation, but people need to do the work. It’s quite common.

I think it’s that you have to be met in the middle. What happens a lot is that people who are sitting in places of privilege can say “I don't know anything, because I’ve never been exposed to it”. But the information is out there. So do you actually care about going out and seeking out that information or understanding those experiences? I’m more than happy to have those conversations. But people need to be asking questions, because I just can’t shove it down people’s throats.

How does that relate to our ELNs – how do you think that they’re good, bad, or different? 

They’re good. They’re really cool, and I think they’re being run right. There’s a job number, you can do it on M&C’s time and collaborate with others in the group. That’s cool. It’s using our expertise, but in a way that’s valued and recognised. We’re not being asked to put in more than anyone else, and it’s a good way for others to join in.

A few months ago when the group did a D&I survey, our belonging score was pretty good. And I think having things like ELNs is a part of that. We’ll keep working on it. You know, the work is never done, we know there’s a long way to go not just in our business, but in society. But I think things like this go a long way to having understanding and compassion for each other.