Introduction
Dino Myers-Lamptey sent his CV to every advertising agency with a name above the door: the Saatchis, the AMVs, the Ogilvys. Around 20 letters. Every single one was a rejection, without a single interview. One company, which asked applicants to include a photo, told him on the phone that they got loads of people from Oxford and Cambridge.
Then he found three media companies on an industry jobs page, applied to all three, got three interviews and three offers. Twenty years later, having ridden the rise of media agencies and founded his own strategy shop, The Barber Shop, he joins Sope Agbelusi to explain why the industry that rejected him still has a diversity crisis, and why fixing it is not charity. It is how you win.
From doctor's son to media buyer
Like many children of African parents, Dino was pointed towards medicine, which promptly became the last thing he would ever do. Art felt financially impossible without a trust fund, so he studied economics and philosophy at Sheffield, where the real education happened outside lectures: running club nights, heading advertising for student radio, winning an elected sabbatical officer post, even publishing a free magazine to promote his own night.
After Mars turned him down at the final stage and the ad agencies rejected him wholesale, the media agency route took him in. His first boss at MediaCom was a man called Sanjay \[CHECK surname: ASR unclear\], and Dino says that visible diversity made him feel comfortable enough to join. He has watched the whole landscape shift since: from FHM shifting a million copies to the rise of digital, and two decades of momentum moving from creative agencies to media.
The numbers that shame the industry
Dino's assessment is blunt. Entry-level representation has improved, around 16.4 per cent ethnic minorities across agencies \[CHECK figure\], but with agency workforces concentrated in London, where true representation is closer to 40 per cent, even the entry level falls short. The real crisis is retention and progression: the IPA census showed C-suite ethnic minority representation went backwards, from roughly 5.1 to 4.7 per cent, against its own 2020 target. And within that 4.7 per cent, he notes, remove the privately educated and you are down to basically zero. Even the diversity is drawn from a bubble.
Advertising's Motown moment
His most memorable frame: advertising today is like music before 1959, the year Motown was founded. There were flashes of brilliance before, but nothing like what came after different people got to build the institution. Advertising boomed in the Mad Men 1960s and, in terms of who runs it and how it persuades, not much has changed since.
The reason it matters is innovation. Creativity is messy: unusual combinations, passionate people with different perspectives, ideas filtered and improved through different frames of reference, like every hit song being made by a different mix of writers and producers. Machine learning can generate a formula hit, but formula instantly becomes average; the human who says "I know that works, but I'm trying something different" is where great comes from. Standing out is a core ingredient of creativity, which makes it a core ingredient of results.
Why the offensive ads keep happening
On the string of brand disasters, Dino attacks the culture and process more than individuals. Too many people touch a campaign for those mistakes to survive, yet they do, because casting and cultural detail are rarely scripted, because the most junior person in the room has no psychological safety to say "hang on a minute", and because token hires are expected to be the guardian of all diverse voices in the world, which no one person can be. His prescription: assume you are not the expert, assume you are likely to offend if you do not check, validate properly, and never do it lightly.
He also names the structural problem: creative agencies are hierarchical silos in which account people are hired to be agreeable, a word he once heard used in a leadership job spec, while creativity is comfortable conflict, the clashing of ideas leading somewhere better.
Treat diversity like a brief
Dino has stopped hand-holding organisations. If a brief landed on an agency's table asking how to increase diversity, he says, it would be solved within half a day and results would come in tomorrow. Nobody treats it like a brief; therefore it does not matter enough to them yet. His lever is the circle of accountability: clients and brands, whose own marketing departments are tragically undiverse and largely unmeasured, must demand more from agencies and themselves; the better agencies then win the work; and consumers, sharper since the black squares moment, now check a brand's board before believing its solidarity posts. Getting it wrong is no longer a cheap miss; with limitless choice, people actively walk away.
Under-sevens football and other leadership laboratories
Dino coaches an under-sevens football team and finds it a surprisingly good laboratory for human behaviour: different moods, abilities and interest levels, and the constant challenge of keeping people engaged and getting them to remember the plan. Sport also gives instant results, which business rarely does; he warns against dragging advertising into short-term metrics when so much of its effect is long and brand-shaping.
On parenting, he refuses to script his children's careers. Give people maximum information, the right level of security to experiment and fail, and the drive to stick at things, because most things are not good until you have pushed through the dull, repetitive stage. His own industry advice: media is a bit rubbish until about three years in, and then it gets good, because the detail work has been mastered and the interesting work arrives. If you never go through the painful part, you never find the enjoyable bit.
Leadership people want to follow
Dino defines leadership as being a person people want to follow: someone people go the extra mile for, feel inspired by, want to be in a room with. The technical parts, vision and organisation, matter less than values you can believe in, championing people when they are out of the room, and turning down tempting things that do not fit the purpose. He points to Jeff Bezos's shareholder letters in the unprofitable years as leadership: holding a customer-first vision against the people paying you.
And on legacy, he is refreshingly contrarian: he does not care much for it. He did not call the agency the Dino Myers-Lamptey Shop. The world moves on, new life brings unimaginable new ideas, and that is beautiful. If he had to write the Wikipedia line, it would be about democratising the belief in your own ability to be creative, and reframing where great ideas come from.
