Megan Pugh has been in the advertising industry for two decades, but until recently she never had a formal mentor.
“I got to the point where I feel like I did as much as I could by myself,” Pugh says.
That’s why, when she heard about Project Violet, a new mentoring program for LGBTQ2S+ North Americans in the advertising industry, she filled out an application. Pugh, who has been a university instructor and mentored former students, applied as both a mentor wanting to share knowledge with others, and as a mentee open to receiving career guidance.
“Education and paying it forward has always been important to me, so it was nice for it to be on the other side of the table for a change,” she says.
The nine-month Project Violet program, organized by queer advertising association Do The WeRQ, is reportedly the first advertising industry mentorship program to match LGBTQ2S+ mentees with experienced industry professionals who are also members of the community. The goal is to equip the 50 mentees with enhanced confidence, larger networks and new skills to carry throughout their careers.
Though Pugh has honed her skills throughout her career, and reached a comfortable leadership position as a creative director, she felt unsure what to work on next or even what she “should be dreaming toward,” she says.
Since October, she has been meeting one-on-one over video calls with Nick Olish, a creative director and copywriter in Los Angeles and connecting with other participants in the program over social platforms. Project Violet mentees range from fresh graduates breaking into the industry, to more experienced participants, like Pugh, who haven’t had the chance to formally learn about the industry from another LGBTQ2S+ community member.
It’s no secret that marginalized employees experience issues beyond the typical challenges of breaking into a career path. For the LGBTQ2S+ community, there can be unwritten rules about navigating this part of ourselves at work. That’s where community-specific mentorship can help demystify an industry’s inner workings.
“Mentors may share lived experiences of overcoming adversity, inspiring mentees to embrace their authentic selves while succeeding in their careers,” says E. Ciszek, an associate professor at the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations, who worked in the industry before pivoting to academia. “For LGBTQ2S+ mentees, such guidance can be invaluable in environments where they might otherwise feel isolated or marginalized,” they add.
Though creative careers often seem like havens for queer and trans workers, they aren’t a utopia. The 2023 All In census, which measures representation in the U.K. advertising industry, found 11 percent of workers were “LGB+.” Gender representation, measured separately in the survey, recorded 1.3 percent of respondents identifying as non-binary or trans.The census also found that just over a quarter of “LGB+” respondents felt likely to leave their company in the next year. One in five in this group said they had high work-related stress, a greater rate than other demographics. A 2022 Canadian survey from PrideAM found “above average” representation of LGBTQ2S+ people, but added that the workers were often younger, with “lower salaries and accumulated wealth than their straight, cisgender counterparts.”
While it’s nice for LGBTQ2S+ to be present in the industry or to talk broadly about diversity, it’s not enough to create change.
“As much as there has been a lot of talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, there has been very little sustained result on that side of things,” says Alan Brown, co-founder of DNA, a branding agency in Seattle and a lead on Project Violet. According to a 2021 survey from the American Association of Advertising Agencies trade group, the prevalence of LGBTQ2S+ workers in the U.S. was below 0.01 percent. But Brown says the program’s objective isn’t based around chasing a certain percentage of representation.
“The goal of this program is to create an environment where people feel they have support, and they feel they have someone to talk to that can help them navigate that in their own careers and in their own companies,” Brown says.
Given that workers can still be fired in multiple U.S. states for being LGBTQ2S+, it can be complicated for people to be out at work, and therefore to find each other to share career-specific insights and supports.
Project Violet’s mentors are all qualified to share both the hard and soft skills that mentees need, and are based around the world from advertising capitals like New York and Los Angeles, to smaller markets and there are even mentors in the United Kingdom or Malta. Among the ranks are mentors who run advertising agencies, and other experts like art directors, copywriters and PR professionals at various seniority levels. Organizers matched up mentor-mentee pairings by looking at participant needs and wants, personality types and career fit. Brown believes that one advantage to the program, the only of its kind in North America, is that pairs don’t work for the same companies.
“I think this really sets up an even stronger potential relationship dynamic between the mentor and the mentee, that they can have really confidential and really direct conversations by not having a professional direct-reporting relationship,” he says.
Do The WeRQ co-chair Graham Nolan says that while being part of the LGBTQ2S+ community doesn’t directly impact what some employees produce at work—think products made on an assembly line—it directly affects creative work outputs in the advertising and marketing industry.
“In this industry, specifically, of content creation, of storytelling, of innovation, you want all the brain power that you can get on the actual ideas, versus, how do I conceal myself, which is a tremendous effort,” says Nolan.
Early feedback for the program from mentees has been positive, suggesting that the program is filling an untapped need. Brown says mentees have been thankful to have the opportunity and people to connect with, and Project Violet organizers expect to take on a second mentee cohort this fall.
Running the program has involved learning as they go and building off resources created by others, like Outvertising, a U.K. non-profit working to make advertising and marketing queer and trans inclusive. “We’re not mentorship professionals,” says Nolan. “We’re advertising professionals who understand the need for mentorship in our business.” In his view, instead of trying to tackle every issue facing the LGBTQ2S+ community at once and getting overwhelmed, programs like Project Violet with specific aims are how progress and incremental changes take hold.
For one Toronto-based mentor, marketing professional Graham-Martin Campbell, his participation was driven by thinking about his younger self. In the industry, he says employees aren’t always offered mentorship at their workplace. “A lot of times it’s sink or swim, and it’s figuring it out on your own.”
He adds that with the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and ’90s, there is a missing generation of people, meaning that peer-to-peer mentorship with a queer focus skipped a generation in some cases.
He was drawn to be a mentor, in part, because being mentored early on “changed the direction and the trajectory of my entire career,” he says.
In Campbell’s weekly mentorship video calls, his primary goal is to help his mentee recognize “that he has so much more power than he recognizes within the spaces that he is sitting in.”
Olish, who acts as Pugh’s Project Violet mentor, says mentorship challenges them both to be better at their work.
“Megan is in a leadership position in her current role, so in giving her advice I am challenged to think, ‘What would I do?’
Olish feels lucky to have had an LGBTQ2S+ mentor earlier in his career. “I’ve always seen myself as owing a sort of karmic debt—needing to provide the same steps up that I was given,” he says.
Though he notes that some LGBTQ2S+ community members complain about the rise of “rainbow capitalism” and the increase in marketing to queer and trans communities, he recalls when companies didn’t want our money, or ourselves as customers and employees.
“Those who came before us fought for a seat at the table. Let’s never take it for granted, lest we lose it,” he says.
Pugh recently decided on her next dream to chase. She’s packing up her life in Florida and moving to Los Angeles, where Olish is already connecting her with people and events.
She feels mentorship programs like Project Violet are especially important in a time of “retrograde” politics that affect LGBTQ2S+ rights, and companies like Amazon and Meta among those reducing diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
“It’s becoming even more difficult to find those communities, to even just find like-minded folks, especially people who are queer,” she says. But now, at least in the advertising industry, the LGBTQ2S+ community knows of one place to look.