This week, with Anora winning Best Picture and films like The Substance, Emilia Pérez, and Wicked telling layered stories about what it means to be a woman in this world, it’s hard to remember a time when women’s stories were not invested in and celebrated by commercial audiences and Hollywood awards juries.
But there was a time. Not long ago, stories about women were dismissed as “chick flicks.” And in our field of advertising, which tends to slightly lag behind entertainment, that time feels even more recent.
So as a female creative in this industry, who is finally seeing incredible storytelling around women and women’s products in our marketplace, I want to take a second to celebrate just how far we’ve come. And I’d like to appeal to our industry, to marketers and to advertisers—despite whatever happens in the news or in Washington—let’s keep raising the bar to push women’s creativity even further.
Creative work for women has been an afterthought
I’ve been doing this job for a while now. And for the majority of my practitioner career as a creative, I was routinely dismayed by how lame and uninspired the creative briefs directed toward women would be. Perhaps this is why I spent all of my time trying to be “one of the boys” and vying to work on their briefs—because the briefs for men had a chance to be interesting, funny, brave, innovative, or even just smart.
I’m not alone. Top women creatives tell me the same thing, again and again, behind closed doors.
But there’s a group out there—about 51% of the population—that needs us to bring our very best thinking when we create messaging directed to and concerning them.
We are an industry that spends nearly $400 billion each year telling stories. The amount of creativity we put into our work directed to women has real world implications. In truth, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to start my agency—because I felt women audiences deserved better creative work. But I wasn’t prepared for just how much doing great work would actually impact women.
In our time at Joan, I’ve seen our teams create sparkling, breakthrough creative thinking that has worked to close the gender gap in CPR, inspire over 2,000 moms to start businesses, rally women to protect the planet, and erode the stigma surrounding women’s body parts.