Agencies can't keep supplying staff to clients

Of the ten "previously-disadvantaged" young blacks who were selected for a one year learnership at one of South Africa's big ad agencies, eight of them did not get past six months before being enticed away by clients offering salaries sometimes only slightly higher than the fairly generous monthly allowances paid to them by the agency.

Of the ten, nine were graduates from one or other of the county's advertising schools in Johannesburg and Cape Town and only one was a "wild card" with mountains of enthusiasm and no tertiary education other than a matric.

Needless to say, this was the guy who did best of all.

Enticed by clients

According to my mole in this group, the kids that bailed out anything from two to six months down the track were mostly enticed away by clients, although a few were simply bored by the tedium of the process and wanted to get on with their lives.

Needless to say, all of these kids with the exception of the wild card were from fairly wealthy families, according to my mole. They were, I was told, more previously spoiled than disadvantaged.

This is happening a lot in advertising agencies today. Clearly one can understand the motivation of agencies taking into their learnership programmes kids that have at least been through the advertising schools. In spite of the fact that by the very nature of the fees paid at these schools suggesting that these could hardly fall in to the previously disadvantaged category.

No time to teach

In short, it is far easier for agencies to mentor people who have at least studied the basics of marketing and advertising, than those who come in not knowing a thing about advertising but are simply full of enthusiasm. A lot of agencies simply don't have the time to teach.

Which is a pity because the history of advertising worldwide shows that some of the greatest minds in the business never had any sort of formal marketing or advertising education. So, can one assume that the same situation exists in South Africa?

Can we assume that there are thousands of potentially brilliant advertising minds out there among our young blacks but that these will never ever get the chance to prove themselves because the status quo of black empowerment in the ad industry dictates that only those who have parents wealthy enough to send them to the advertising school will get the nod?

Also journalism

It's the same in many other businesses. Journalism for instance, where most newspaper, radio and TV newsrooms insist on some sort of tertiary qualification for editorial hopefuls in spite of the fact that they all know how many great journalists never had these qualifications.

Getting a wide cross-section of young blacks into the ad industry in South Africa is not just about affirmative action or BEE. It is about creating a dynamic industry. It is as necessary as transforming rugby from a sport supported by four or five million South Africans to one supported by 40 million - not just from the point of view of empowerment and fairness but to give us the best chance of winning a Super 14 championship eventually.

Quite simply, the more players, the better our chances. In advertising terms, the more players, the wider the diversity of background, the better the industry will prosper.

Ad agencies in this country need the courage now to look beyond those few privileged young blacks who have been able to afford tertiary advertising education and to start nurturing the enormous latent skills that surely exist.

And most of all, clients need to stop this incessant poaching of advertising agency blacks.

Whenever the ad industry is called to account for itself in terms of transformation, it is always quite shocking to see how relatively few are actually employed at senior level in ad agencies. It is equally shocking to see the huge number of blacks that have actually been through the ad agencies.