We live in an incredibly diverse society but you wouldn’t know it from much of the advertising output. I would love to see real change over the next five years. Wouldn’t it be brilliant if campaigns reflected the diversity of the target audience? If we are to achieve this diversity we need to change some of our own hiring practices.

As an industry, at least in the junior roles, we are pretty good on equal employment opportunities regarding gender and LGBTQ, but we are not so good on ethnicity, disability, socio-economic background or age. I want everyone to be bright, but I want a really good mix of bright people who can be themselves at work and so bring their best to work.

If we are to bring about change, we also need to change the briefs we put out and the demands we make of our agencies. We need to be explicit about wanting to have representative campaigns. And for the avoidance of doubt I am not insisting you have to feature older people in ads for a skateboard or men in ads for sanitary products. But I am saying that you could feature a disabled child in your skateboard campaign or have a woman from an ethnic minority in your tampon one.

And importantly, if you decide to be more inclusive, making sure you have people in the room who really know what a child with that particular impairment might be like or how women from that particular ethnicity are likely to live. We are not all the same, although personal experience tells me we are more likely to have rice in the house.

If we can bring about this change, then living with the groan and the eye rolling will have been more than worth it.

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