With an ironclad commitment to making equity more than just a buzzword, FREE THE WORK orchestrates a creative revolution, championing the global workforce of diverse talent that has long been overshadowed. Through pioneering resources like the global talent database, community support, and educational tools, the initiative is revolutionizing the media landscape. Together with Chloe Coover, FREE THE WORK’s Unity & Integration Manager, we delve into the intricacies and ambitions of Director Census, a project that seeks to map the current terrain of the industry and spearhead actionable change for a more equitable and diverse creative world.
What are the main objectives of FREE THE WORK initiative and the Director Census project?
Chloe Coover: FREE THE WORK is a non-profit organization committed to making equity actionable in media and to creating opportunities for a global workforce of underrepresented creators behind the lens in TV, film, and marketing. Our organization strives to be the most innovative, effective, and action-driven resource possible until industry-wide equality becomes a reality. We accomplish this goal through our FREE THE WORK pledge, global talent database, community, DEI guidance, impact & insights reporting, and educational tools that help creators to demystify the media industries. FREE THE WORK exists to empower a creative revolution, led by the world’s underrepresented creators.
Our Director Census project started in 2021 as a way of checking the pulse on issues faced by our community.
As FREE THE WORK evolved from Free The Bid, we wanted to begin with a focus on directors working in the commercial space, globally, since this was our organization’s core starting point. For as long as we’ve been in existence, we had heard anecdotal rumblings about issues being faced by directors in our network (unreasonable bidding timelines, tokenizing in the bidding process, etc) and we felt that this survey would help us to chart the industry landscape since the launch of the original Free The Bid pledge back in 2017.
How has the Director Census evolved from its first iteration in 2021 to the expanded scope covered in the latest research?
Chloe Coover: Our Year 1 edition laid the groundwork for the topics covered in these surveys, investigating the experiences of advertising directors between 2019 – 2021. Our questions focused more specifically on the bidding and pitching process. For Year 2, we expanded the topics covered, gaining deeper insights into budgetary information and adding questions that explore elements of the culture on set; work/life balance; and perceptions of the state of DEI in the industry.
If you could point to main “diseases” that diminish the overall quality of creative output, what would that be?
Chloe Coover: Creators working in the advertising space today are being squeezed from a number of different directions. They’re expected to devote on average around 30 hours of uncompensated labor within the pitch process; to work under tighter timelines than ever before and to compete for dwindling budgets. These conditions are based around larger issues at play in the industry, trickling down from brands to agencies to production companies. Understandably, it becomes harder and harder to produce the highest quality creative work under increasing pressure from all sides.
Source: https://freethework.com/programs/director-census-year2
In what areas does the underrepresented group of directors suffer most?
Chloe Coover: The expectation of uncompensated labor within the pitch process is notably a barrier for historically underrepresented creators. A mid-level director working to build up a name for themselves within the industry is expected to sustain a career with the understanding that they’ll be contributing hours of unpaid labor on bidding; for some, this can be a really barrier to entry and discourages those without a large safety net from continuing on in this career path. Furthermore, we heard many underrepresented creators speak of experiences of tokenization – being included in bidding pools with no expectation of being considered for the job, solely to meet diversity quotas. This becomes a vicious cycle in which, again, a higher degree of unpaid labor is expected with less payoff, which thus ends up pushing out promising talent.
Source: https://freethework.com/programs/director-census-year2
The latest census addressed aspects like budgets, respondent experience levels, and deeper contexts. How did these additional dimensions offer a more nuanced understanding of the industry’s challenges in ensuring a fair approach for intersectional directors?
Chloe Coover: After publishing our Year 1 results, further questions arose, with interested industry stakeholders desiring more granular detail on our respondents. We wanted to be able to be as effective as possible in identifying whether the issues raised were impacting creators at certain career levels or budget ranges; or whether the issues in question were universal (albeit with some understandable variation in experience for those at different stages). We wanted to make sure that our respondents represented a fair cross-section of experience levels, in order to speak more broadly about the industry at large.
What does the latest Census tell us about the work culture and work-life balance of directors?
Chloe Coover: Interestingly, the Census results seem to indicate that many creators, despite the issues raised throughout, see the experience of working on set to be an overall positive one.
One third of directors surveyed reported that their work-life balance was “unbalanced,” but that they don’t want to leave because of their passion for the work.
Still, we saw that in terms of on-set experience, overall, across ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation, underrepresented directors tended to respond less positively.
Source: https://freethework.com/programs/director-census-year2
Unpaid labor, stolen intellectual property, hasty deadlines, and erratic scheduling were highlighted as issues in the first census. How have these concerns been addressed or altered in the industry since that initial report?
Chloe Coover: Unfortunately, the Year 2 results point to these concerns being a continued source of frustration for our directors. Unpaid pitches remain a huge sticking point for the community: the majority of directors spend an average of 30 hours on a pitch, with directors from underrepresented ethnicities and genders spending a slightly higher average amount of time on their pitches. In terms of bid / win breakdowns across demographic communities and various budget ranges, our survey found that white directors bid on jobs with budgets over $100K at a higher rate than directors of other ethnicities and won a larger proportion of jobs at all budget sizes than other groups.
Do you feel 2024 may be the year of a bigger change?
Chloe Coover: The survey’s findings are not without some degree of optimism. We calculated the “win rates” for different demographic groups (i.e. out of the jobs that each community reported bidding on, the amount of jobs won) and the win rates hovered at fairly similar percentages across the board for different communities. For example, male-identified creators had a 36% win rate for jobs over 100k; this was the exact same win rate as the 36% reported by creators of all other genders.
Despite overall concerns regarding unpaid labor, a lack of transparency in the bidding process, and experiences of discrimination / tokenization, it is heartening to see that among the directors surveyed, certain historically underrepresented groups (such as white women) appear from this sample to be experiencing relatively similar success rates to their counterparts in the demographic majority.
It is certainly a testament to the concerted efforts of many individuals and organizations, along with larger changes implemented inside brands and agencies, that we see these encouraging numbers.
However, it is worth noting that as FREE THE WORK’s mission has always aimed to celebrate and uplift historically underrepresented voices, the sample pool of respondents could potentially skew towards more underrepresented creators. This is based simply on who may have been most excited to participate, despite efforts to ensure that the survey was available to creators of all demographic communities. With this in mind, though, it was notable to look to which communities whose numbers remained low within the respondents: even in a sample that skewed toward more underrepresented directors, we saw disproportionately low numbers of responses from directors with disabilities and trans / intersex folks. There is still much more work to be done to create an industry that truly nurtures talent from all intersections of identity.
In what ways can industry stakeholders, including directors, agencies, and others, get involved with or support the Free the Work initiative based on the census findings?
Chloe Coover: Invest.
Commit to tracking and incentives.
Find ways to level the playing field.
Create goals. Not quotas.
If you need help, any of us at FREE THE WORK can help. Beyond us, there are many organizations that can help with any one of these items.
