‘Awareness, access, opportunity’: Creative industries urged to engage working class talent

While on the face of it the creative industries are largely considered to be progressive and welcoming, in truth many organisations are failing to take inclusion seriously.

This inaction is being compounded by systemic barriers that start as far back as school. In November, the Sutton Trust published stark findings revealing how a lack of socio-economic diversity within further education is restricting access to creative careers.

The research found more than 50% of students studying a creative degree at Oxford, Cambridge, King’s College London and the University of Bath are from upper-middle class backgrounds. Furthermore, there are four times as many younger adults (aged 35 and below) from middle class origins than working class backgrounds working in the creative industries.

These statistics came as no surprise to Stu Outhwaite-Noel. Founder of Creature London and now chief creative officer at newly established agency Modern Citizens, Outhwaite-Noel has been passionate about levelling the playing field for underrepresented talent for decades.

From class ceilings and persistent pay gaps to a depressing lack of representation, he believes the situation is getting worse rather than better.

It makes business sense to bring these different brains and different lives within our industry.

Stu Outhwaite-Noel, Modern Citizens

“Sadly, in the last few years – at least from where I’m standing in the advertising industry – it would appear the lack of working-class talent coming through or entering into the industry is decreasing,” he notes.

There is an assumption, Outhwaite-Noel points out, that the ad industry is progressive and liberal, so all agencies need to do is put creative work out into the world that speaks to underrepresented communities and job done.

“The truth is that’s not enough. When it comes to adopting things like the Living Wage. When it comes to looking at the work environment or paths for progression within our agencies, or dead simple things like how you make time for people for whom these are alien cultures, ways of working and language. Just simple things like that, we’re not good,” he states.

“Ultimately what that leads to is people – who haven’t been educated in ad colleges as to the way to behave, turn up, dress, speak – feeling othered.”

For Outhwaite-Noel, awareness, access and opportunity are the three fundamental elements that help anyone break into the creative industries. Growing up in a small market town in Northumberland, he only discovered advertising was a career option because somebody, who happened to have been taught by the same art teacher, showcased a series of ads during a talk with his class. One was an Eric Cantona campaign for Nike.

“It was suddenly like my eureka moment as a 16-year-old where I realised that there was industry which would embrace ideas, in which you could be kind of OK at drawing and OK at writing, but ultimately if you had good ideas then people would bring those to life for you,” he explains.

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This school session set Outhwaite-Noel on a path to studying advertising at college in High Wycombe, a two-week placement in 2003 with Mother – where he stayed for almost eight years – before founding Creature London in 2011.

He has shared his experience of the industry with students over the past two decades. The first 15 of those years he would tell young people you’re not genetically programmed to work in advertising. Rather, you get an opportunity and work at it.

“I used to say the traits you need are personality, tenacity and initiative. It’s only in the last six/seven years that I’ve realised actually there’s a fourth that needs to be added which overrides all those three and that’s opportunity,” says Outhwaite-Noel.

He is adamant you give anybody with personality, people skills, communication skills, tenacity and a drive to work an opportunity they can fly within the creative industries. The problem is getting that opportunity in the first place.

“When I think of people I’ve worked with in the past, like leisure centre jobs or behind the bar or paper rounds if you want to stretch right back, I think of people that would be brilliant advertising creatives, because they’re savvy, they’re smart, they’re charming. They work hard,” Outhwaite-Noel reflects.

“Sadly, the vast majority of them aren’t [ad creatives], because they’re just not being given this sort of opportunity, the awareness, access and financial means to make a go of it.”

Adopting the Living Wage

Money is a major sticking point for underrepresented talent, from the cost of education to the price tag of starting out in a city like London.

Outhwaite-Noel founded the Placement Poverty Pledge in 2015 after an encounter with someone on work experience who asked if he could leave early that day to work at Waitrose.

“I genuinely thought he meant the in-house Waitrose creative team. I asked: ‘What are you doing working there?’ And he said: ‘Stacking shelves,’” Outhwaite-Noel recalls.

This insight into the financial pressures involved in getting your foot on the ladder led to the creation of the pledge. Agencies commit to pay interns/placement talent on a rolling or fixed-term contract at least the UK Living Wage or London Living Wage – currently £13.15 per hour in London and £12 per hour across the UK. After three months on a rolling contract, agencies then switch the intern to a freelance day rate of at least £150.

With close to 90 agencies signed up, the pledge raised awareness of the need to pay early talent properly, but Outhwaite-Noel acknowledges it didn’t change agency culture.

I used to say the traits you need are personality, tenacity and initiative. It’s only in the last six/seven years that I’ve realised actually there’s a fourth…opportunity.

Stu Outhwaite-Noel, Modern Citizens

Later in 2021, he introduced ‘In the Wild’, a programme run in collaboration with transformation agency Commercial Break to open up placements to people who can’t afford to study for a degree in advertising. The programme centred around Adi Hussain, who went viral that year as he sought crowdfunding to pay for this ad college tuition.

Outhwaite-Noel and the team at Creature London invited Adi on a 12-week development placement, giving him experience of how the advertising process flows from brief through to production. He had sessions with teams from account management, strategy, creative and production on a weekly basis, while also working on live briefs and attending biweekly sessions with a confidence coach.

“Four years on, Adi is still working with us. He’s an amazing, award-winning creative. He’s doing great stuff, but sadly we haven’t done it again. We tried to get other agencies to adopt it, but what we found is it’s an investment,” Outhwaite-Noel explains.

“You need to invest in paying for the support you get around it, whether that be through confidence coaches or the likes of Commercial Break to help support both the agency and the placement person.”

Keen to return to the In the Wild concept in the future, the Modern Citizens creative chief also sits on the creative and cultural taskforce convened by Citizens UK and The Living Wage Foundation, working on the campaign to ‘Make London A Living Wage City’.

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In the last year, more than 50 agencies have signed up to become Living Wage Accredited – on top of the 29 already committed – the aim being to have the whole advertising industry join the scheme by 2026.

For Outhwaite-Noel, this doesn’t just mean being Living Wage Accredited with regards the creative, strategy and production teams, but for the cleaning staff, security and all suppliers in the agency ecosystem.

“Outside pay structures, we’re working on a means of welcoming people in without necessarily expecting them to build portfolios or go through further education in advertising,” he adds.

“That’s a big thing and then working on structures within our agencies to allow it to become a more inclusive and not culturally excluding environment.”

The fact people still feel the need to make the argument that bringing working class talent into the creative industries results in better work is baffling to Outhwaite-Noel. He opposes the “obscene” notion one set of privileged middle/upper class people can get into the minds of everyone from Land’s End to John O’ Groats.

“We are ultimately an industry that needs diversity of creative thought to appeal to a diverse populace. It’s just a given,” says Outhwaite-Noel. “It makes business sense to bring these different brains and different lives within our industry, before you even get onto the fact it makes our working life better.”

Anyone interested in learning more about becoming Living Wage Accredited can email Stu on [email protected]

Marketing Week’s Opening Up campaign is pushing for the democratisation of marketing careers. Read all the articles from the series so far here.