Diverse talent is powering the UK’s advertising industry
At LinkedIn, we invest significant time helping members, businesses and policymakers navigate the ever-changing world of work so that we can more effectively connect talent with opportunity. And our unique and powerful talent insights sit at the heart of everything we do.
We were therefore thrilled to join forces with the Advertising Association and use this data to inform their new report - Advertising Pays: World Class Talent, World Class Advertising - providing an in-depth snapshot of the UK’s advertising and marketing industries. The report provides great clarity as to why the UK is a global advertising hub, at the top of its creative game.
In all honesty I already knew why. Every day I experience first-hand why the UK is such a creative powerhouse - the people. We’re a wonderfully diverse and international workforce, enabling brands and their agencies to create campaigns which resonate across international, cultural and socio-economic boundaries. The opportunity to use LinkedIn’s labour market insights, gleaned from our 500M+ global members, to bring some evidence to the debate around the role of international talent in the UK’s advertising sector was a unique opportunity. It's been fascinating to see just how internationally diverse the workforce really is.
Our analysis delved into a pool of 328,000 LinkedIn members who work in advertising and marketing in the UK. Our data has shown that the UK, and London in particular, is an international hub for advertising talent - more so than other known magnets such as Amsterdam, Paris and New York. 53% of new arrivals to London’s advertising sector between January 2016 and January 2017 came from abroad.
But it’s not just London that is reaping the benefits of a culturally diverse advertising industry. The report reveals that more than half of the sector’s workforce is located outside the capital, and nearly a third of talent arriving from abroad settles beyond the M25. This means that the whole country will continue to need seamless access to skilled international talent over the coming years.
The business case for diversity shouldn’t need justifying. Diverse talent has a direct impact on business success, and McKinsey’s research proves it. According to their report, ethnically and racially diverse companies are 35% more likely to have financial returns above the national industry median - while gender diverse businesses are 15% more profitable than average. I’m in no doubt that this is a key reason why the marketing and advertising industry contributes ￡120bn to the UK economy and supports over one million jobs.
The challenge for every business is hiring and retaining the best people, and that’s particularly true during times of economic uncertainty. Given there’s irrefutable evidence that diverse teams are more successful, the companies which attract employees who truly reflect the customers they serve will ultimately be more productive, more successful and more adept at retaining their talent over time. I’m not saying that this is always an easy task - and I have written previously on the challenge of uncovering unconscious bias across an organisation - but it does require businesses to be proactive, and this needs to be led from the top.
The advertising sector is facing unprecedented changes, both from within and externally. But my hope is that this new report will not only help employers make better decisions about their talent pipelines, but also inform policy makers and educators on what’s required to ensure our wonderfully diverse industry continues to thrive in the UK.
You can read the full report here. https://www.adassoc.org.uk/advertising-pays-6-world-class-talent-world-class-ads/