#MeToo leaves its mark: Ad world bats for gender rights, Tarana Burke star attraction at Cannes Lions festival

CANNES: For the past eight years, Interpublic Group (IPG) has been hosting its annual Women’s Breakfast at The Martinez at the Cannes Lions festival that’s an annual highlight of the advertising world. But the mood this year is more triumphant than before in the wake of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements sweeping across the industry and, in their wake, felling of several powerful figures across media, entertainment and even marketing.

Barely two weeks ago, WPP’s former chairman Sir Martin Sorrell made headlines when the Financial Times published allegations of his mistreatment of employees, some of them women, and his use of company money at a brothel in London. A few years before that, Kevin Roberts, head of Saatchi & Saatchi, had resigned in the wake of the backlash over his comment that the gender diversity debate in advertising was “over.”

During a chat with ET in Cannes, IPG’s chief Michael Roth said that there was still a lot of work left to do. “We started in Cannes eight years ago,” he said.

“We had the first Women’s Leadership breakfast. At the time, the emphasis was that there weren’t enough women in the creative part of our business. Fast forward to today: we’ve got a thousand responses to our breakfast.”

The star attraction is Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement.

“We’re really focusing on how do we really move the needle,” Roth said. “I think we’ve done a better job with respect to women representation at IPG — 52% of our managers are female, 30% of our board is female.”

Procter & Gamble and its global chief marketing officer Marc Pritchard are using Cannes to announce a series of initiatives designed to push diversity.