Dan Brooke speech on diversity

2 March 2017

 

Channel 4's Chief Marketing and Communications Officer and Channel 4 Diversity Champion Dan Brooke's speech at the publication of Channel 4's 360° Diversity Charter - Two Years On report

Thank you Charles.

My name’s Dan Brooke and I’m responsible for Marketing & Communications at C4. I’m also the company’s diversity champion. I’m proud to hold both roles – and in a company it’s not possible for me to love any more than I do.

As for you all – well – how fabulous, may I say, you look – AND how fabulously diverse. And that’s just based on the differences that I can see, not the many more that I can’t.

I want to start with a … bold … claim: that Channel 4 is now one of the very best companies at diversity in the land. That is a strong statement, I know, but in this era of Fake News it’s not an “alternative fact” either. It’s the independent view of the National Diversity Awards, who made Channel 4 Britain’s Best Diverse Company last year. And it’s the finding of Ernst and Young, who’s National Equality Standard is the most forensic, independent diversity audit available in the UK.

We applied for the N.E.S. last year and they told us just before Christmas that we had done well. So well in fact that we were the only company they had ever placed at their highest level of achievement: “Institutionalised Inclusion”.

Now, nice though this recognition is, I must assure you that it doesn’t distract us from the ever present realization of how much further we still have to go.

Sometimes I hear it said that diversity is a … “problem” … to be … “solved”. But to us it’s an opportunity to be taken advantage of. Yes, we have diversity built into our public service remit from Parliament. But it doesn’t take a statutory obligation for us to embrace it. It simply takes for us to observe the reality of its effects in front of our noses.

In short: … that … diversity … works.

Why? Because it makes us more innovative, more creative and more commercially successful.

The map we use to guide us there is our 360 Degree Diversity Charter, which sets out 30 ways in which we are trying to transform the diversity of our people: on screen, off screen, at our HQ – and at all levels, across all aspects of diversity. That’s what we mean when we say 360.

After the first year we reported that 24 of these 30 initiatives were rating green, with six amber. Now, after the second year, 28 are showing green and two amber.

And the detail of all that is listed in this – our Charter Two Years On report – which has a wealth of information on the many things we have learnt so far. Hopefully you can see the results for yourself though, in programmes like … Channel 4 News … like Humans … like First Dates… or Chewing Gum … and Grayson Perry: All Man.

Hollyoaks is a particularly good example. Our daily soap for young people has always embraced diversity, which is why it won Stonewall’s Broadcast of the Decade Award. And why Annie Wallace, who plays head teacher Sally St Clair, became the first trans actress to be nominated for a BAFTA. Recently Amy Conachan joined the cast as science teacher Courtney Campbell. Amy is a wheel chair user, but mostly she’s just an outstanding young actress.

Meanwhile the new commissioning editor for the programme at Channel 4 is Manpreet Dosanjh. She started on our Diverse Deputy Commissioning Editor programme and did so well she was offered a full time job.

Lets dwell for a second on the Paralympics.

Jeremy Isaacs, Channel 4’s founding Chief Executive – and a man, dare I say, not renowned for complimenting his successors – called London 2012 “Channel 4’s finest hour”! With a four hour time difference, we didn’t imagine that Rio 2016 could be more successful. But it was – with more young people watching the coverage from Rio than they had in London.

Why did that happen?

Because we went for it. In London, half of the on-screen talent were disabled – in Rio it was two thirds. In London we didn’t even measure how many production staff had disabilities – in Rio almost 20% did. Part of that was our year long Rio Training Scheme, which launched the careers of 24 young disabled rookies into the world of TV production.

When I met them I asked that what they’d learned. Josh, a young man with cystic fibrosis, said that they had learned an awful lot – but so, he said, had the companies they’d trained with – about working with disabled people.”

In Rio itself, the organisers told us that every single international broadcasting studio had disabled people in it. They also said they’d walked that floor in London and found only one: Channel 4’s. It was like seeing the world change in front of our very eyes.

We heard again and again too that our Yes I Can advert had been played spontaneously in schools across the world. At the end of the Games we even received a phone call from the Exam Board. Undeterred by our assumption that they had got a wrong number they told us that Channel 4’s marketing and coverage will be included in the A Level and GCSE curriculum from next year.

Even the ad industry started to change. Our Superhumans Wanted competition offered £1m free airtime to the advertiser that best championed disability. We thought 20 or 30 brands would apply, but almost 100 did, most of them saying they’d learnt something new about disabled people in the process.

Maltesers won and made three brilliant ads, all with disabled contributors. Now Mars don’t give out their sales data but they do say there’s a close correlation between sales and testing. And these ads tested better than any they had run for 6 years. So there it is folks. It’s official: … disability … sells!

For us, 2016 was also our Year of Disability and I’d like to play you a tape now that shows how we make it sell, in our programmes.

PLAY TAPE

We had a number of specific goals for our Year of Disability and we met or exceeded them all. We doubled the number of disabled people in 21 of our top shows. We developed the careers of 26 disabled people within the production industry, over and above the Rio trainees. We allocated 50% of our apprenticeships and 35% of our work experience placements to disabled people.

We have also been transforming our workforce at Horseferry Road. We already knew that the number of BAME people joining Channel 4 had gone up by 50 per cent since the Charter began. But by the end of 2016 the number of Channel 4 staff with a disability had risen from 3 per cent to – 11 per cent. It had almost quadrupled.

How did that happen?

Well, partly because we have hired more disabled people. But also because we worked with Lord Holmes and the disability charities – thank you to all of them – to create a more inclusive culture – especially one where people with non-visible impairments, often mental health related, can come forward and ask for support. At the heart of this work is a Diversity Task Force, drawn from across the organization, that has been embedding the Charter throughout the company.

Leaders such as Ralph Lee, Stephanie Cox, Matt Salmon, Prash Naik and Ade Rawcliffe have been championing this work. Without their leadership, and that of Charles and David and everyone on the Board, we would not be where we are today.

But let me end by telling you how we plan to make further progress. The 30 initiatives in the Charter are being reclassified into three new categories: New Effort Needed, The New Normal and Not Returning. And the detail of that, again, is in our report.

2017 is also going to be “A Year of Four New Frontiers”.

Lenny Henry and Pat Younge and others have said it. We need more BAME role models within broadcasters.

We agree.

So, first, we are setting ourselves the goal of enhancing the progression of 10 high potential BAME people at Channel 4, into more senior roles. Second, we want to broaden the diversity of the people who shoot our programmes – so we will be giving new opportunities on Channel 4 productions to 40 TV directors from under-represented groups. Third, we want to ensure that we have more diversity between our programmes. So we will be giving away another £1m of airtime to the advertiser that best champions diversity.

We mustn’t forget our own marketing either, so Channel 4 is now the first broadcaster to use the Diamond system to measure the diversity of the big campaigns we produce. Fourth and finally, we want to make sure that we are open to people from all socio-economic backgrounds. Social mobility is a key frontier of diversity now and we are most grateful to the Minister for the light he is casting on it. It is an area of diversity where the thinking is less well developed. So we have set ourselves the challenge of coming up with a pioneering strategy for how we will improve it in the future.

Last year I stood here and quoted Andy Warhol, who said: “People say that time changes things, but really you have get in there and change them yourself”. Well that’s what we’ve been doing – and I am delighted to commend our progress to you – imperfect though we know that progress is.

What else have we learnt?

We’ve learnt that, without diversity, we would not be as innovative as we can be. Without diversity, we would not be as creative as we want to be. And without diversity, we would not be as commercially successful as we need to be.

Our task now is to make diversity so much the norm that nobody – in whatever their position of power – would ever dream of doing anything so incomprehensible as trying to … turn back the clock.

Thank you.

It’s now my pleasure to introduce you to Riz Ahmed, star of Star Wars Rogue One and Film4’s Four Lions. We’ve been lucky to work with him and we’re incredibly lucky he’s here today to speak to us.

Riz, you could not be more welcome.