A Textual Analysis of Gender Diversity and Creativity in Award-Winning Agencies’ Self-Representations

Abstract

Gender disparity continues to permeate the advertising industry, with only 11% of creative directors in agencies being women. This study uses textual analysis to examine how Ad Age’s Agency A-List annual award recipients’ websites are encoded with messages of deep-level diversity attributes (e.g., attitude, beliefs, values) despite lacking surface-level diversity attributes (e.g., gender) among the agency winners’ creative teams. Forty-eight agency webpages were analyzed using constant comparative data analysis, illuminating award-winning agencies’ communicative processes to position their advertising teams’ creativity on their websites. Themes included (a) positioning the team as experts; (b) championing disruption; (c) committing to change; and (d) seeking and rewarding grandiosity.

Acknowledgments

I thank and acknowledge Dr. Barbara Friedman at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for her many useful discussions and comments on this manuscript during her fall 2020 Textual Analysis seminar.