Back in 2020, my partner Ian Murray and I asked a representative sample of the UK population and a sample of marketers to place themselves on the 'rich/poor ladder'. They rated themselves on a scale where 0 was poorest and 10 was richest. A sample of UK adults rated themselves on average 4.8, and marketers rated him 5.5.
According to Marketing Week's 2024 Careers and Salaries Survey, the average marketer earns between £50,000 and £68,000 a year, depending on their field. The ONS reports that his average annual personal income in the UK is just over £27,000. To some extent, marketers' responses to the ladder question indicate a sense that they are somehow better off than others. However, marketers still position themselves firmly in the middle of everyone else.
We then asked people where they wanted to be on the stairs and found a similar pattern in both samples. All adults gave him a 7.0 and marketers gave him a 7.7. Note that the suction gap is the same for both. Everyone wants to move up the ladder a couple of rungs above her. The big problem is that people in our industry are way out of line with where they are right now. Marketers are already near the top.
Remember, marketing is one of the most elitist professions in the UK. In a study called “The Aspire Window,” Ian and I found that 70% of people in marketing and advertising grew up in families where the highest earner had a social rating of AB. In comparison, the UK's population is only 29% of her. whole. All our research suggests that marketers are elite, but they don't realize it.
classification problem
In addition to this lack of self-awareness, our research found that people in marketing are more likely to have an analytical thinking style. This means, among other things, a focus on classification.
There is no better example of this than Channel 4 and the Republic of Media's recent attempts to audit television advertising on behalf of the working class. This reinforces my belief that class and social mobility are still poorly understood in our industry. In the broader report, they say class is a “vague social construct”. This is despite incredibly robust definitions derived from decades of social science research, including his ONS framework for measuring social mobility.
However, even though we can accurately measure social mobility, it does not mean that we can identify working-class people based on their appearance alone. Imagine an HR team walking around your office, observing you from top to bottom, and determining your social class based on the way you speak and the clothes you wear. Surely you will find it vulgar and offensive. The study's authors acknowledge that it's very difficult to judge a class from a 30-second ad, but they conduct the audit anyway. This is because marketing is an industry obsessed with the need to categorize dichotomously. Unfortunately, it only leads to stereotypes and emphasizes marketers' biases.
If you don't know where the middle ground is, it's very difficult to connect with the majority of the population.
The audit failed to identify 59% of all coded characters. In 7% of ads, a character with a low social grade plays the lead role, while 34% is supposed to be a character with a high social grade. You can only measure what you can measure. According to the report, personality classification was largely based on material signifiers such as environment and clothing.
Channel 4 has not released the entire audit, so the methodology is unclear. However, we highlight one example of Fairy's non-biological ad featuring a mother bathing her baby. It was audited that it featured upper/middle class characters because of its “exclusive” homes and well-dressed actresses. Do working class people not dress properly? Do they not care about their appearance? The interior of the house is smart. Don't working class people invest in making their homes look good? I think you can see the problem here.
London's bubble is a misnomer, the real bubble is marketing culture
This classification problem was further emphasized by famous advertising man Dave Trott. He is as guilty as Channel 4 of dichotomous/zero-sum thinking, despite his position of defending the common man. In his recent post on X, he wrote: “Don't just read the Guardian, read the Sun, read the Daily Mail.” Let's go to soccer as well as the opera. Don't just drink white wine, drink beer too. Don't just eat at a restaurant, eat pie and mash. There is a world outside of middle-class university graduates. Where do I fit in? I go to watch soccer, but I also love white wine. The idea that drinking a pint of beer can provide deep and meaningful insight into the lives of working-class people is frankly absurd.
Class and social mobility are very complex, and there is no silver bullet for representing class in advertising. These oversimplifications and checkbox exercises seek easy answers to incredibly complex questions. These recent examples say more about the industry and its notions of class than about advocacy for social mobility or a true understanding of mainstream audiences. As the results of the ladder questions show, the calibrations are all wrong. If you don't know where the middle ground is, it's very difficult to connect with the majority of the population.
There's a bigger problem at play here. Remember that working class people are still an outgroup in our industry. I would argue that in the ad he can't identify a class of 6 out of 10 people is not a bad thing. Therefore, I urge marketers to prioritize preparing the industry for itself. The best way to better represent our work is to surround ourselves with people from all walks of life.
Andrew Tenzer Co-founder of Burst Your Bubble.
