We want to acknowledge our silence on social media these last few weeks. Like many in the industry, we took time to listen to BIPOC voices and discuss our role in systemic racism as an agency, but also to make concrete, action-oriented commitments to anti-racism at AMP. We’d like to share those commitments today—as a start, not a final solution. To our friends in advertising, we call on you to join us. Let’s continue to listen, but more importantly, to act, continuously and with purpose, to make our industry a better place to work for everyone.
As advertisers, we’re in a unique position to reach wide audiences, to tell stories and uplift voices, to help shape culture. That’s a lot of power. It’s time we used that power to implement policies and practices that are actively anti-racist and work to make advertising an equitable industry.
At AMP, our internal conversations have focused around our BIPOC teammates and how we can better support them, and also our role in the wider advertising ecosystem. We’ve brainstormed around how we can update recruiting to bring more BIPOC into advertising, and how we can be better citizens in the communities where we do business. These are the initial commitments we’ve made as an agency to help put our reflection and conversation into action:
- Evolve Our Operating Plan
Moving forward, we will dedicate 10% of our agency billable time to do work for Black and Latinx owned businesses, at no cost and as an evolution of our existing pro-bono work. By putting tangible resources back into the local communities where we live and work, we can help these businesses grow and thrive—and contribute to long term change. - Change How We Recruit
Our internship program will become an apprenticeship program. To help bring more Black talent to the industry at large, we will partner with established nonprofits to develop an apprenticeship program and offer hands-on, paid training to young talent who may not otherwise have access to launch their career in digital advertising.
Furthermore, we fully acknowledge that BIPOC are under-represented in director and above positions at AMP. Our HR & Talent team is developing new recruiting practices to bring in more diverse talent across all seniority levels, not just at the entry level, so that diverse perspectives are represented in our leadership, too. - Establish an Internal DE&I Team
We’re creating a formalized diversity, equity, and inclusion team to establish workflows for diversity- and inclusion-centered projects, develop concrete timelines, lead future initiatives, and keep AMP accountable. We’ve already accepted internal applications for a leader to help build out this committee and will make a formal selection in the coming weeks. - Join ANA’s Commitment to Equality, Inclusion, & Systemic Change
We co-signed and joined in with ANA’s industry-wide initiative, pledging to achieve stronger diverse representation in our industry, increase spending in multicultural marketing, demand accuracy of multicultural and inclusive data, and work to achieve an equitable creative supply chain. - Invest in Implicit Bias and Anti-Racist Training
We’ll be providing extensive bias training to Human Resources leadership and AMP executives/management to understand implicit bias and promote anti-racist values from the top down. Our HR leadership has already compiled and assigned informal anti-bias training for AMP employees at all levels—we invite you to take the Harvard Implicit Association Test along with us. - Do the Work for the Long Term
There’s so much more that must be done, so there must be more to come. We’ll dedicate more of our social feeds to talking about anti-racism in advertising, and keep everyone posted on our progress on increasing diverse and inclusive representation at AMP.
This may be the first time you’re hearing from us on the subject of anti-racism, but we can promise it will not be the last.
