DEI retreat empowers brands to create work driven by conviction, not policy

As DEI evaporates across culture and industry, a critical question remains: Whose vision of diversity was being implemented in the first place? For the advertising and creative industries, DEI’s retreat represents a significant loss and a seismic shift in what gets produced, whose voices are amplified and whose careers advance. For Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) creatives, however, it’s business as usual—we’ve been operating and hustling outside these structures all along. I was born in Iran to artist parents and grew up in Section 8 housing in the San Francisco Bay area. My studio, Even/Odd, was founded out of necessity. Coming from a low-income background with no higher education, the unconventional stories I wanted to tell from the margins—and the way I wanted to tell them—lacked mainstream appeal. I’ve been primed throughout my life to develop an attuned instinct that, among many things, has helped me see through the theater of concepts reminiscent of “DEI” long before they morphed into industry buzzwords. These frameworks have always been cropped, flattening the “different” into digestible categories that conveniently excluded communities such as mine. SWANA identities aren’t just overlooked; our exclusion reveals DEI’s fundamental design flaws. What’s happening now isn’t a retreat. It’s power shedding a temporary disguise, returning to form after a brief, unconvincing performance. Data-Driven Marketing Playbook Join us May 22 in NYC to explore how data powers marketing Learn more here The calculated blind spots in DEI’s vision SWANA is not even considered an official minority group. Census designations label us “white,” erasing our lived experience. This bureaucratic fiction is absurd given decades of post-9/11-ism, travel bans and interventions in the Middle East. When agencies establish quotas for diverse suppliers, we do not “count.” The National Minority Supplier Development Council doesn’t recognize SWANA-owned businesses. The result? Systematic exclusion from economic opportunities that are supposedly designed to uplift marginalized communities. While the industry congratulated itself for progress, our exclusion from minority recognition revealed DEI’s fundamental contradiction: a framework supposedly built for inclusion that selectively determined which communities deserved recognition. The system welcomed dissent, but only to a point. The glaring omission of SWANA reveals just how unserious and haphazard DEI education has been. For example, the same industry that spent a year championing Black Lives Matter was, like the rest of culture-at-large, absent in 2023—the deadliest year of police killings on record in the United States. This erasure exposes the nature of corporate DEI efforts: diversity was always more about fashion than reform. The advertising and creative industry’s approach to diversity also created a monolithic ecosystem where talent was compartmentalized by identity. Black creators were given agency to create work about Black culture and Asian creators for AAPI month, while white creatives maintained the freedom to explore any subject at any moment. This pigeonholing isn’t just limiting—it can be a career dead-end, leaving creators with nothing once identity opportunities dry out. Let’s get past the ‘Struggle Olympics’ DEI also inadvertently turned diversity into the “Struggle Olympics”—creators competing for limited resources by chasing the latest DEI trend. This dynamic pushed many toward reactive work, where cosplaying activism became a necessary tool to gain visibility. Many were reduced to reactive commentators rather than multidimensional visionaries. And the worst part is that people began to play into this and abandon that inner artist. SWANA’s exclusion in DEI frameworks made me refuse to engage in projects that felt sentimental rather than singular or substantive. Too often, DEI initiatives encouraged work that allowed dominant audiences to feel momentarily moved without having to confront structural realities. That kind of performative engagement was the canary in the coal mine. Terms such as BIPOC are also an issue, flattening distinct cultural experiences and erasing the specificity that gives stories their power. Iran, a multiethnic country distinct from the Arab world, is frequently lumped into vague “Middle Eastern” representation. Within agencies, SWANA creatives rarely received even the limited recognition given to other marginalized groups. When visibility came, it was often reduced to creating “Middle Eastern” campaigns or Muslim-focused content, disregarding the region’s and diaspora’s rich diversity of faiths, cultures and perspectives. True diversity means freedom to create beyond prescribed boundaries. Creative autonomy should be a universal right. Excellence is multiplied by authenticity, but when agencies reduce diverse creators to cultural representatives rather than full-fledged artists with unlimited potential, they practice sophisticated tokenism, not inclusion. Ad Age Small Agency Awards Showcase your agency’s creativity, business success and commitment to a thriving workplace. Enter today The future of DEI—or whatever it might be called next—requires the advertising and creative industry to fundamentally rethink its approach. If its blind spots regarding SWANA communities can be addressed, it might offer a blueprint for a more substantive framework—one that creates genuine opportunities for paradigm-shifting work rather than reactive, identity-based slots. Agencies, brands, and studios should examine their talent pipeline, asking not just “Do we have diverse creators?” but “Are we allowing all creators the same self-determination?” We also need to separate cultural equity from economic equity. There’s a difference between an industry promoting diversity on its website and an industry ensuring diverse founders have access to real capital and opportunities. If DEI 1.0 served only to help existing institutions navigate this moment unscathed, then we must be vigilant about what comes next. The goal should not be to help these structures shape-shift into the next trend but to demand new pathways that challenge their dominance altogether. The silver lining of this moment is that it offers a lot of clarity—revealing who remains committed to genuine inclusion and who has retreated to the next industry trend. As the corporate spotlights dim, we can now distinguish between fickle allies and those in for the long haul. This is an opportunity for agencies to reexamine their principles and create work driven by conviction, not manufactured policy. Ultimately, we must move beyond DEI as a label and toward what it should have always represented: the critical understanding that the most vital creative breakthroughs emerge from the periphery. And investing in the infrastructure to support that is necessary—not just for the SWANA community, but for everyone who has been excluded from the industry’s prescribed narratives. When we can create from outside the center, we create new reference points that shift the status quo. See all of Ad Age’s 2025 Agency A-List winners here

DEI retreat empowers brands to create work driven by conviction, not policy

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