Our Commitment

To our staff, our clients, our suppliers and anyone with an interest in our business:

Eliminating societal injustice is the responsibility of both businesses and individuals. We strongly believe that everyone benefits enormously from having diversity of thought, culture and experience.

There is an obvious moral case for diversity, but also a role in powering better creative thinking and ideas which ultimately lead to business results. Gender-diverse companies are likely to financially outperform companies which have lower gender diversity by 25%. Ethnically diverse companies are likely to financially outperform less ethnically diverse companies by 36%.

Diversity of thought should therefore be not only a commitment, but a baseline prerequisite for all companies and organisations.

In the summer of 2020, we took a closer look at the role we must play to help remove the social injustices that exist in our industry and wider society.

We published our commitment to becoming the most inclusive and diverse agency in our space by 2024, to document a long term actionable and measurable plan.

Now in 2022, this is a statement of the progress we have made and an updated version of our commitment to diversity today, sharing where we are at on this journey.

Since 2020, we have:

  • Launched an internship scheme in partnership with Greenhouse Sports, providing young people from under-represented communities in London exposure and access to our industry. Our first intake graduated in September 2022.
  • Launched ‘Step Up’, our dedicated offer, supporting brands and clients to use their partnerships to make culture more inclusive. We continue to roll this out across our clients.
  • Created an ‘Inclusion Alliance’, a series of strategic partnerships with key organisations that we work closely with to help guide and shape our thinking and execution, ensuring authenticity reigns and the work has maximum impact. Partners include culture change experts Utopia, social purpose music platform Limitless and Digital Talent and Entertainment agency VAMP.
  • Made Hacking Inclusion training compulsory for every member of staff. We now run them twice a year to ensure everyone takes part
  • Rolled out an ongoing outreach programme called ‘Limitless Live’, the UK’s first ever social-purpose black music festival, reaching aspirational talent from disadvantaged backgrounds through the power of music and entertainment.
  • Worked with a dedicated I&D consultant to help us continually evolve our strategy as well as advising on priorities, partners and measurement.
  • Set up a dedicated employee Inclusion & Advisory Group which provides counsel and guidance to the SLT. It includes people from across the business, at all levels, and acts as a safe space to provide feedback freely and acts as a sounding board for work created across the agency.
  • Created gender parity within the agency at all levels, including the introduction of dedicated female leadership training programmes and maternity coaching
  • Participated in and creating initiatives reaching young people in underrepresented communities such as iCAN Project LDN, Speakers for Schools and Advertising Unlocked
  • Sourced and continuing to secure commercial agreements with a number of person of colour specialist recruitment partners, resulting in far greater representation at junior levels
  • Participated at industry events on the importance of DE&I and holding the industry to account at events such as at BAME 2020

We have a way to go, but we are sharing our progress: both the good and the bad. We believe that the only way to creating real organisational change is to be transparent with where we are, and where we are striving to be.

Whether you work for us, we work for you, or you want to work with us, we hope that together we will make our business, our industry, and the world a more inclusive and diverse place.

We have outlined our inclusion & diversity mission as follows:

  • We must be representative of the society we serve
  • We must play our part in driving change for a more equitable society
  • We must promote active allyship, antiracism and zero tolerance to prejudice
  • We must make sure there are no barriers to working at or for M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment London
  • We must create equity for all under-represented groups in our business

How have we moved our policy forward from 2020 to today in 2022?

We work with a dedicated I&D consultant to help us continually evolve our strategy as well as advising on priorities, partners and measurement.

We have set up a dedicated employee Inclusion & Advisory Group which provides counsel and guidance to the SLT. It includes people from across the business, at all levels, and acts as a safe space to provide feedback freely and acts as a sounding board for work created across the agency.

The Inclusion & Advisory Group advise on the delivery of our five key pillars to make change:

  1. RECRUIT & RETAIN
  2. TRAINING FOR CHANGE
  3. INDUSTRY CHANGE
  4. SUPPLIER CHANGE
  5. EQUITABLE PAY

Below, we have highlighted the ways in which we have made progress in each of these areas since we first established our commitment in 2020.

  1. RECRUIT & RETAIN

THE HARD FACTS

Our senior leadership representation is as follows:

Our four-member senior leadership team is equally split on gender & 100% white

Our directors are 44% female and 100%

Our Business Directors are 83% female and 83% white

Our overall leadership group is 55% female and 96% white

Whilst our gender split continues to move in the right direction, we have a way to go in regard to ethnicity.

THE PROMISE: RECRUIT

We committed to…

  1. Make recruitment our number one focus to ensure fairer representation at all levels – from intern to board level. As soon as we are able, we will be addressing the under-representation at Business Director & Board Level.
  2. Serve the city we work in by ensuring there is 50/50 gender split, ensuring that 40% of candidates that we interview are people of colour as well as committing to providing equal opportunities & an inclusive environment regardless of class, disability, sexual orientation, gender, religion or age.
  3. Always hire the best person for the role. To say ‘we just don’t see enough diverse candidates’ is simply unacceptable. We must work harder and be prepared for it to take longer to have a truly diverse shortlist of candidates for every role.
  4. Make sure we have representation within the interview process with a Q&A section for all candidates dedicated to our I&D policy and progress.
  5. Change our criteria – we must focus on looking for talent, not just like-for-like experience.
  6. Expand the channels in which we find talent and never stop interviewing and meeting new people.

How have we measured up?

  1. Fairer representation at all levels – This is still our focus and we are working hard to ensure this happens. This is a constant directive so is a work in progress.
  2. Ensuring a 50/50 gender split and that 40% of candidates are people of colour. We are still compiling statistics on this and will update as soon as we know.
  3. Hiring the best person for the role – We believe if we continue to prioritise points 1 & 2, we will inevitably be hiring the best person for the roles we post.

THE PROMISE: RETAIN

We need to ensure our culture is such that anyone who identifies as a person of colour or a minority can feel truly included and want to stay and grow within our business.

We committed to…

  1. Be more transparent about our commitment to I&D and our progress in this area
  2. Make sure all our staff are educated to understand different cultural experiences
  3. Be a business that supports person of colour led causes, talent & businesses

How have we measured up?

  1. Be more transparent – we have weekly DE&I board meetings and quarterly updates to the wider company re progress
  2. Educate staff on other cultural experiences – We hold mandatory hacking inclusion training for all staff and will continue to expand our training repertoire to ensure staff have at least a basic level of cultural differences and sensitivities. Additionally, all staff have access to our diverse group employee networks
  3. Be a business that supports person of colour led causes, talent & businesses – As well as the above, we have an initiative to identify and work with a Black business on a pro bono bases. We have started the process, and this will be an ongoing initiative for the foreseeable future. We have identified one Black owned business which we are collaborating with and hope to develop an ongoing long-lasting relationship.

TRAINING FOR CHANGE

THE HARD FACTS

We currently have a range of training programmes in place but are still in the process of working establishing our mandatory company-wide inclusion training programme.

We committed to…

  1. Educate everyone in our workplace through dedicated training at all levels, with a compulsory structured training programme throughout the year. This includes structural bias, inclusion and allyship training.
  2. Create a dedicated leadership training programme for all person of colour employees.
  3. Create a new initiative to equip our employees to deal with situations where people they are working with (either internally or externally) have not demonstrated allyship
  4. Create a support system for new starters, especially those from minority backgrounds, during their probation periods to help them bed into our fast-paced environment comfortably, including assigning a mentor and a buddy

How have we measured up?

  1. Commitments 1,2 and 3: There is now a programme of ongoing internal and external mandatory training for all and intense training for senior leaders within the business. Training will be ongoing and continually reviewed.
  2. Created a dedicated leadership training programme for all employees.
  3. A buddy system has now been created and rolled out, this is now an ongoing initiative for all

INDUSTRY CHANGE

THE HARD FACTS

The UK sport industry is a white male dominated industry, especially at the highest levels.

Across Sport England and UK Sport funded bodies, on average only 5% of board members identify as from a Black, Asian or minority ethnic background [1]. It’s something we acknowledge and are working to change both in our business and beyond.

Whilst the Entertainment industry has more diverse representation, there is still significant underrepresentation at the most senior levels, with only 8% of board positions across the five main UK broadcasters held by people of colour [2]. This figure does not reflect the diversity of London (the city in which we are employing).

We committed to…

  1. Stand for something tangible that shows how we are playing our part to effect change in our industry
  2. Create external outreach, training, and internships for people from underrepresented groups looking to gain experience in our industry
  3. Work to have a direct impact in our industry through partnerships with NGBs, rights holders, artists and athletes to make sure we, as an agency, have a commitment to change – not just through our clients.
  4. Deliver senior level pro bono consulting for a small group of independent POC led businesses / movements
  5. Offer pro-bono services to a wider pool of POC led businesses, e.g. design time, staff for events, strategic support, editing, creative etc

How have we measured up?

  1. Stand for something tangible to effect change. We have now developed ‘Step Up’, our dedicated offer, supporting brands and clients to use their partnerships to make culture more inclusive. We will continue to roll this out across our clients.
  2. Create external outreach, training and internships: We have rolled out an outreach programme called ‘Limitless Live’, the UK’s first ever social-purpose black music festival, reaching aspirational talent from disadvantaged backgrounds through the power of music and entertainment. We have also launched a bespoke internship with charity, Greenhouse Sports, an organisation working with young people living in the inner-city. We have welcomed two interns to date and intend for this to be a rolling partnership and pipeline for entry level talent.
  3. We have created an ‘Inclusion Alliance’, a series of strategic partnerships with key organisations that we work closely with to help guide and shape our thinking and execution, ensuring authenticity reigns and the work has maximum impact. Partners include culture change experts Utopia, social purpose music platform Limitless and Digital Talent and Entertainment agency VAMP.

SUPPLIER CHANGE

THE HARD FACTS

We work with multiple external suppliers daily, without knowing much about their make-up, ethics or how they run their businesses. If we’re spending money, whether on behalf of a client or our own funds, then we want to ensure it’s going to businesses who have the same goals as us.

We committed to…

  1. Create a directory of preferred suppliers based on their diversity commitments and pledge to only work with those who have a commitment in place.
  2. Complete an audit of every existing supplier by the end of the year to ensure they have an equality policy in place.
  3. Create a procurement process for new suppliers to include a specific RFI on I&D.
  4. Ensure a diversity standard with talent and influencers recruited for our client campaigns.
  5. Be transparent and up front about our expectations to clients and supplier about our I&D criteria.

How have we measured up?

We want to work with suppliers who share our values. Our approach is to work with our suppliers by auditing where they are and working together to improve. We are creating a supplier engagement survey for all suppliers to be sent to all large suppliers in Q3 2022.

We are in the process of creating and distributing a supplier code of conduct charter for all suppliers in Q1 2023. This will outline our expectations to clients and suppliers about our I&D criteria.

We plan to hold workshops with our suppliers and listen to their key issues. We will then test and learn and roll out to smaller suppliers in Q2 2023.

We are in the process of developing a questionnaire to measure our suppliers on how they are currently performing, what are their pain points and how we can work together.

This will be an ongoing process, meaningful change will not happen overnight, however our plan is to have a robust procedure in place with all suppliers by Q3 2023.

In the meantime, our ‘Inclusion Alliance’ of strategic partnerships with key organisations that we work closely with, helps guide our thinking and execution, ensuring authenticity reigns and the work has maximum impact. Partners include culture change experts Utopia, social purpose music platform Limitless and Digital Talent and Entertainment agency VAMP.

  1. EQUITABLE PAY

Gender

Where we are:

2021 gender pay gap figures show that there is a mean gender pay gap of 17%. This means that because there are currently more men in senior positions in our business, the average male salary is 17% higher than the average female.

Ethnicity

Where we are:

The government recently announced that the ethnic pay gap will not be mandatory to complete. However, we strongly believe that ethnic pay gap reporting is just as important as gender pay gap reporting. We commit to reporting on ethnicity from 2023. We will continue to be transparent, and we commit to sharing the results once they have been calculated.

And finally…

We will keep this open letter on our website for all to see.

If we are not delivering on any element, we expect to be pulled up on it.

Thank you for your time in reading this.

We’re committed to our continued journey in creating a more diverse & inclusive workplace and industry.

[1] Source: Diversity in Sport Governance, Sport England, 2019
[2] Source: Diversity & opportunities in television. Ofcom, 2019