The problems the employees are calling out are not new, according to a Black creative who is the only Black person in his department.
June 25, 2020

The problems that minority agency employees are calling out in their workplaces now are not new. They have been a constant and oppressive drag on their careers for years. "The major problem is inclusion. Black people do get hired but they leave. You do get hired, but you don’t fit in," said a Black agency employee. In the latest edition of Digiday's Confessions series, we hear from a creative about what it's like to be the sole Black person in his department, how this moment compares to the #MeToo movement and what agencies need to do now. Read more below.

  • "I don’t hide how I feel. But I also don’t ask my agency to do anything, I just make my expectations very clear," said a Black creative.
  • IGTV had already begun making inroads among YouTube stars, but now there's money to be made as Instagram begins to financially incentivize creators to upload to its long-form video service.
  • On Monday, President Trump suspended new work visas for foreign-born talent in certain fields until at least the end of the year. “It’s going to have a dramatic impact on agencies and every company that hires outside of the United States,” said Mark Koestler, co-chair of business immigration at law firm Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel.
  • Young people in minority groups will have an especially tough time starting a career in media and marketing during the pandemic. The gap between companies saying they are diverse and their actual racial and social balance is not lost on their potential staffers.
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  • In a time of unprecedented disruption, the rules of advertising on Amazon have changed. In a new playbook, learn critical strategies for protecting profit margins on Amazon, including performance monitoring, planning around fulfilment and prioritizing new product launches. Sponsored by ChannelAdvisor.
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The Confessions
The problems the employees are calling out are not new, according to a Black creative who is the only Black person in his department.
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Through a pandemic, an extraordinarily polarizing presidency, and a reckoning over racial injustice in both America's newsrooms and society as a whole, nothing has shaken Porter Berry's confidence in bringing "the marketplace of ideas" to readers. "You give them the news. You give them analysis from multiple perspectives, and they can make up their own mind. I mean, that's what freedom's all about," the Fox News Digital editor-in-chief said on the Digiday Podcast.
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