Adland Has a Blind Spot: The Working Class

More than half of Britons identify as working class. Yet they remain conspicuously absent from advertising. Channel 4 wants brands and agencies to confront the gap, both in front of and behind the camera.

Advertising has always sold aspiration: a shinier, more desirable version of life that audiences are encouraged to buy into. But working-class Britain is strangely hard to find in that picture.

Recent examples are scarce, with campaigns for the Home Office, Maltesers, Bodyform, and the return of This Girl Can among the exceptions. More often, working-class people appear in public service campaigns or functional local advertising for categories such as bookmakers and pawnbrokers. For one of the country’s biggest consumer groups, representation remains remarkably thin.

This summer Reebok released its heist-focused Born Classic, Worn For Life three-part campaign featuring EastEnders' Laila Morse — is this how major brands engage with working class people - representing them as would be criminals?

Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives have pushed advertising to reflect society more accurately and challenge outdated stereotypes. Yet social class has received far less attention.

According to YouGov polling, 56 per cent of Britons identified as working class in 2024, while Channel 4’s Mirror on the Industry audit found that just 11 per cent of people depicted in advertising are identified that way. Meanwhile, last year’s All In Census from the Advertising Association found that only 19 per cent of respondents working in the industry identified as working class, compared with its benchmark of 40 per cent of the population.

The gap is not simply one of visibility.

Research conducted by Dentsu and The Outsiders Small Acts of Agency In A Fractured World suggests people are increasingly turning inwards as they disconnect from a culture dominated by negativity and from a world in which they do not recognise themselves. For brands, that creates a challenge: marketing cannot only chase the biggest cultural moments. It also needs to understand the smaller, everyday ones.

Without working-class people shaping that work, some of those insights risk being missed entirely.

“I think the first step is getting rid of stereotypes,” outlines founder of The Outsiders, Steven Lacey. “There’s a strong case for recruiting people without traditional degrees and actually believing in them. Proper representation has been overlooked. From an advertising point of view, we don’t spend enough time having real conversations. Years ago, Russ Lidstone [former Havas London chief executive officer] made people spend weekends with fishermen or miners so they could meet new communities. Individually, it’s about reading and actively consuming different perspectives.”

And yet many industry leaders don't see a problem. Creative Access research from 2024 found that upper middle-class execs were unaware of working class underrepresentation in senior roles. Meanwhile, three quarters of respondents said they agreed it is harder for working-class people to land a role in the creative industries.

“Class is the one area where we really aren’t making progress in the creative industries," admits Bibi Hilton, CEO of Creative Access. "It’s worrying that soft social identifiers are still influencing class prejudice and biases.”

That gap is the focus of this year’s Channel 4 Diversity in Advertising Award. The broadcaster is challenging brands and agencies to rethink how working-class people are represented, with £1m of advertising airtime going to the winning campaign.

"Over the past decade, Channel 4's Diversity in Advertising Award has helped drive meaningful change across the industry, while proving that inclusive advertising delivers results. This year, we're challenging brands to rethink how working-class people are represented in advertising and bring forward fresh ideas that reflect one of the UK's largest and most influential audiences," says Rak Patel, chief commercial officer at Channel 4.

Crucially, the brief extends beyond casting. Entries must demonstrate meaningful involvement from working-class creatives and consultants behind the scenes. Alongside the main prize, five shortlisted entries will each be eligible for up to £250,000 of matched commercial airtime.

Representation starts behind the camera

For Guy Bradbury, chief creative officer at M+C Saatchi UK, the numbers point to a problem that begins long before anyone steps onto a set.

"That gap isn't an accident," he says. "For too long, our industry has recruited for familiarity. We hire people from the right universities. The right courses. With the right level of polish. People who look, sound and think like the people already in the room."

The issue, he argues, begins in strategy meetings, creative reviews, and client conversations, where the assumptions underpinning a campaign start to take shape.

"If those voices aren't in the room from the get-go, we shouldn't be surprised when the work feels disconnected from the people it's trying to reach. For me, people don't experience life as consumers. They experience it as citizens. Their choices are shaped by where they live, what they earn, the communities they belong to and the challenges they face."

That makes recruitment part of the representation problem. As the cost of entering advertising rises, a career in the industry becomes harder to access for those unable to fund university, internships, or poorly paid entry-level work.

The consequence is not only a less representative workforce. It is a narrower range of lived experience shaping the ideas agencies sell.

Building a broader pipeline

Agencies have responded with programmes designed to widen access, among them M+C Saatchi Open House, BBH’s The Barn, Leo’s Futures, and VCCP’s Challenger Academy.

Jim Thornton, recently retired executive creative director at VCCP London and co-founder of VCCP Challenger Academy, argues that working-class representation in creative departments has declined significantly since the 1980s.

"It is a damning indictment of the industry," he says. "Talent is everywhere, but opportunity is most definitely not."

The academy now runs programmes for primary, secondary, and further education students, with resources freely available online. Thornton says 65 per cent of the students it worked with last year came from the UK’s most disadvantaged communities, while 80 per cent of its interns over the past four years have gone on to careers in the creative industries.

There are wider industry efforts too. Earlier this year, the Advertising Association and Media Smart launched a virtual work experience programme intended to encourage more young people into advertising.

But widening the talent pipeline addresses only one part of the problem. The other sits closer to the money.

Following the money

Ben Essen, global chief strategy officer at Iris, argues that better representation cannot simply mean putting different faces on screen. It has to shape the ideas themselves.

"We should be aiming to build new ideas that start from their viewpoint," he says. "The outcome then is not work that simply holds up a mirror to today's working-class reality, but fresh creative ideas that are surprising, bold and confidently push that reality forward. Let's aim to represent the working-class outlook, not just the people."

Then comes the harder commercial question. Brands often prioritise more affluent consumers, meaning discussion of working-class audiences can be closed down before creative development even begins.

"Are working-class people a genuine audience for this brand? What is the brand losing by excluding them from its focus? Is it even appropriate to be targeting them? In our eagerness to better represent a neglected audience, it's important we don't accidentally exploit them."

That tension gets to the heart of Channel 4’s challenge. Better representation requires agencies to broaden who gets into the room and whose experience shapes the work. But it also asks brands to interrogate which audiences they consider valuable in the first place.

If working-class Britain remains largely absent from advertising, the question is not simply who appears on screen. It is whose lives the industry considers commercially worth understanding.