#freethebid

Filmmaker Ramaa Mosley On Creating One’s Own Opportunities.

[powerpress]Filmmaker Ramaa Mosley directs commercials, documentaries, feature narratives and more. Like myself, she believes we do different jobs for different reasons and creates her own opportunities. You’ll love the part of this chat when she explains how originality is overrated. I disagreed but then came around. 

Ramaa is also the Executive Creative Director and one of the Founders…

Next month, the U.S. may (or may not) see women make a tremendous leap forward if Hillary Clinton becomes the first female president of the country. Meanwhile, there's another lady shaking things up when it comes to inequities in the ad industry. About two weeks ago, director Alma Har'el rallied top agencies and marketers around an important cause: getting more female talent behind the camera on commercial shoots. With the help of agencies including Pereira & O'Dell and Mother, she introduced "Free The Bid," an initiative that called for agencies to include at least one female director every time it triple-bids a commercial production. The program also asks brands to encourage their agencies to include female directors in the bidding process and also urges production companies to add more women to their rosters.

We are all well aware that creative leadership teams at ad agencies are now, and have long been, dominated by white guys. But what about the directors behind the ads? You know, the ones whose names often appear near the bottom third of the footlong credits list??

Back in July, Mashable reportedon a project in which an unnamed commercial director sought to compile a list of all the active female directors in the industry. This list does not specify the portion of the work assigned to any of these directors, so one can’t be sure whether it directly reflects the amount of available gigs landed by women. But it concluded that less than 7 percent of directors are female, which is less than the same measure based on Creativity/AdAge’s official Production Company A-List.