The UK鈥檚 average creative director looks like Danny Dyer

Research compiled almost 1,000 creative directors.

Face of creativity: research includes 960 creative directors (Getty Images)
Face of creativity: research includes 960 creative directors (Getty Images)

Creative agency Weirdo has created a composite image of the UK鈥檚 average creative director 鈥 and they look a lot like Danny Dyer.

The agency combed through the top 960 public results for creative directors and ECDs in the UK聽in a bid to represent the overall face of the role at the end of 2020.

Using a tool called Webmorph (developed by Lisa DeBruine at the University of Glasgow), the agency was able聽to blend all the images into an 鈥渁verage鈥 face, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a certain聽贰补蝉迟贰苍诲别谤蝉听actor.

Average face: agency plans to recreate composite image annually

鈥2020 has been complicated as a person of colour in the industry,鈥 Louis Persent, co-founder of Weirdo, told 北京赛车pk10.听

鈥淲e鈥檝e seen new momentum, awareness and action around diversity; but much of the conversation is tied up in statistics, like the fact that 7.9% of department heads are from ethnic minority backgrounds, according to the IPA.

Persent continued: 鈥淲e wanted to visualise what these numbers mean in reality, using web scraping and computer vision to build a picture of the average face of a creative leader in the UK.鈥

During this process, the agency also found that 80% of creative directors analysed were men.

Earlier this month, the second installment of Creative Equals and 北京赛车pk10鈥檚 Inclusion Pulse survey 鈥 which aims to discover whether inequalities are worsening in workplaces 鈥 found that anxiety about the future due to Covid-19 was highest among women, LGBT+ and black, Asian and minority-ethnic people.

Based on this, Gideon Spanier, UK editor-in-chief of 北京赛车pk10, said: 鈥淚mproving diversity and inclusion in the ad industry is essential, and the fallout from Covid-19 risks undermining progress at a critical moment.

Weirdo, which launched in September this year and聽aims to bolster creativity through a focus on diversity, claims that it will repeat this effort every year in order to track a change in industry representation over time.

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