McCann Joburg Is Shaping a Generation of “Kick-Ass” Women

Above (left to right): Executive creative director, Toni Hughes, and creative director, Thandeka Gilbert, of McCann Joburg

Toni Hughes and Thandeka Gilbert’s recent promotions hold a special significance. Stepping up to the respective roles of ECD and creative director at McCann Joburg, they’ve joined the small fraction of women who make it into positions of creative leadership in this industry.

It’s a phenomenon where women hold the majority of mid-level creative roles (82%), but become an extreme minority in the higher ranks: only 7.4% of executive creative directors, for instance, are women, a sliver that whittles down to 0.7% for women of colour. With such a large pool at the mid-level, the issue is not a lack of talented women vying for those titles – it’s the barriers that prohibit individuals from accessing the opportunities, support, and recognition they’re entitled to.

As two distinguished, multidisciplinary professionals, Toni and Thandeka have worked hard to battle those odds. Toni brings over two decades of experience to the table – including as the former creative director for NIVEA Africa, 48 local and global awards, and a career that spans programming, 3D animation, digital design, and traditional advertising. Armed with expertise in both copywriting and art direction, Thandeka has created work that’s been celebrated at the likes of Cannes Lions, Loeries, Pendoring, New York Festival Midas Awards and Creative Circle.

In their new positions of leadership, the McCann Joburg pair will have greater power to uplift others facing the same obstacles they’ve battled on the way up. Speaking to LBB’s Zara Naseer, they discuss the specifics of what those obstacles are, their preferred methods of tackling them, and the support they’ve received from the agency’s “pride of lionesses.”

LBB> Toni, you’re now part of the 7.4% of ECDs globally who are women. Has your journey to this point shown you why the percentage is so low?

Toni> Organisations in our industry are very good at hiring a woman at entry level, but they’re really not good at keeping them because of changes in a woman's life, be that motherhood, marriage, even perimenopause. We like to praise ourselves for moving with the times, but we're running on timelines and processes that are quite archaic. It's not just about making the circle bigger; it's about redesigning the stage so that women don't fall off halfway through. It's an absolute design flaw that we exclude half the talent from the leadership pool and miss out on a beautiful variety of ideas.

I also think, in my experience, that many women are actually doing the work and operating on an ECD level already, before that title even arrives. I've certainly had peers that have left advertising because of women not getting the recognition and not being supported in these roles.

LBB> Thandeka, have you found that being a woman of colour in particular has had a unique impact on your professional experience?

Thandeka> Part of me thinks that it's just too many women of colour for us to refer to this as unique anymore. Instead of looking at women of colour in the industry as a minority, making that phrasing bigger might demand the attention it requires.

The experience isn’t abrasive or in your face, but there are subtle nuances where perhaps I'm offered less leeway than the next other person, the expectation of me is greater than the next person. We have five hoops to jump through where other people have one. We are constantly operating from a space of either burnout or overthinking, because we are trying to always be a step ahead. It's tiring to factor in the potential issues that might come up because of your existence – preparing for every possible outcome, preempting not being the angry Black person, not being too direct, not being too vocal.

LBB> Are there any challenges that feel specific to the South African advertising industry?

Toni> We are in a fascinating paradox, where on the one hand, we've got this beautiful, diverse nation, energetic markets, and on the other hand, we’re still wrestling with these legacy structures and these inequalities.

I'm sure globally everyone is suffering this squeeze on budgets, particularly now with the trade deals, and the limited resources flow to the same people over and over again. Those could be senior management roles, projects, things like that. But saying that, constraint is the mother of brilliance, and in the advertising industry, particularly in South Africa, we've worked with that, and we seem to have learned to do more with less. Our work shows that. We carry this tension, this injustice, as well as humour and survival instinct. Those two can live together, which really makes the work quite raw and resonant as well.

LBB> How has McCann Joburg addressed the issues and supported your development?

Thandeka> Whether it’s by luck, the company currently employs a lot of women, and a lot of women of colour, so that support was already communicated without it being sold to me verbally. Women are just kick-ass, and McCann Joburg decides to recognise that.
Our CCO Loyiso Twalahas also been very vocal about advocating for women of colour. He does his best to reach out to creative platforms – Loeries, Cannes, The One Show – and try to get not even women from McCann, but women in the industry, to be on panels and to judge. He's trying to change a bigger problem, and that’ll eventually trickle down to influence the McCanns, the Ogilvys, the VMLs.

There’s also a level of autonomy that we have here, where the men trust the women to do their thing. Whether it's a cultural nature of women just being charged to take care of things when they’re younger – siblings, home, cooking, cleaning – the men in this building never doubt that things will get done. This place is being run by women.

Toni> It's a very supportive structure, so when issues do arise, there’s this collective that makes sure that your people are looked after. We’re 78% female, so we’re almost this pride of lionesses that looks after our kind when people have to take time to deal with what they need to. There isn’t a culture of clock watchers and people staring over your shoulder. We know what we’ve got to do in a day, but there is a maturity around people having lives outside advertising.

Thandeka> It’s very flexible, and people are able to shift their diaries to attend to things like parent responsibilities. As long as you fulfill your needs, you don't have to do them in the structure that is set out. A day has 24 hours – if you come in at 7am, by all means, you can leave at 4pm to go get your kids.

LBB> Do you have plans for how to use your new leadership positions to influence the creative culture and team dynamics at McCann Joburg?

Thandeka> I'm never interested in the mechanics of diagrams and presentations: I come from a school of just doing things, and I don't necessarily even speak about them. But for me, it's definitely continuing in the same vein that I have been, which is always being welcoming of other women, and being loud about celebrating and advocating for them.

Our CCO has created sessions where we teach people a skill, so I could choose to teach people how to write a tagline, but most of the time it's about mentorship. There weren’t enough female mentors of colour for me, so I'm happy to be able to be a woman of colour who can now mentor others. My only rule is that if you want me to mentor you, you’ve got to listen to me, because otherwise we just waste each other’s time.

Toni> Giving people the autonomy to take risks, but being there to support. We’ve got a thing here called ‘failing forward’ – so be free to make mistakes, but then learn from them. By playing that supportive role for people, they can really flourish.

Also, having an open door policy. I tell all the people that directly report to me, ‘You can WhatsApp me, you can email me, you can call me, you can pull me aside’. That’s the personal approach I take.

Obviously, through the lens of diversity, we’ve got a DEI committee that we speak with, and well known that diversity helps make magic. So if you in a leadership role can create an environment where people feel comfortable and supported so they can flourish, that's where the magic really happens.

Thandeka> I also like to advocate for people generally to have confidence, but also for women to speak up. I know that as a Black female, I can be seen to be abrasive, but I've taught myself to always call things out in the moment, because if I wait too long, then I will stay too silent, and I'll overthink it.

I always say to people, ‘If you don't like what happened, tell someone’. It's not about shouting, but you need to literally take the words out your throat and vocalise them. My therapist used to call it ‘giving people their shit back’. So, you might go to a meeting where something happens, and now you've got that person's shit – you're carrying it, you’re feeling some type of way, and now your Tuesday is ruined. Just give it back. When people think about expressing something to HR, they think that they're going to put that person in trouble, but it's not about that. It's literally about freeing yourself.

There's a fear that's instilled in women that if they speak, they’re going to rock the boat and be seen as X, Y and Z. We need to unlearn that, because it is crippling us.

LBB> Can you each share a moment in your career when you’ve felt most valued, championed, and optimistic?

Toni> We can get really caught up in the work and the creativity, but when you zoom out, there are some magic moments. So I recently worked on a very important purpose project that actually saved local people's lives, literally. I was sitting next to South Africa's top cardiologist, and he asked me for some professional advice on how to take this particular campaign to a global stage, and at that moment, it just struck me how powerful our actual industry skills are beyond advertising, through our storytelling, our framing, the way we amplify things. In that moment, I wasn't just a creative, I was part of a solution, and that really touched me deeply.

Thandeka> For me, it's every moment someone took a chance on me. It always translated into people having faith in me, or trusting me with more visibility, more responsibility.
One was when I went from being an art director to a copywriter. I remember when my then CCO offered this, and I was like, ‘You want me to change careers on the clock and you'll still pay me?’. He said, ‘Yes, and if you don't like it in six months, you can totally stop and go back to normal’.

I’d thought that if I wanted to pivot, I'd have to take time out to go back to school, study, get a qualification, get experience, and then they’d take me seriously. But they’d seen I was able to write, because I write in my own capacity and bring ideas to the table in the form of a script. So I jumped on it, and I won my biggest award just a few months after at Cannes.

Another was here at McCann before I’d become a creative director, which I could feel in my heart was going to be a turning point. I was going to go on a tough 10-day shoot, and I remember thinking to myself that I was too small to go and lead the trip, but it was so good to be recognised. It was only on the trip that I realised that I could do it, and I did it through the worst flu ever.

Toni> That’s what's beautiful about when someone is recognised – the agency benefits as well. People deserve their praise.