One of the most quietly startling ads of this year’s Super Bowl featured Mary J. Blige, a star of the game’s blockbuster halftime show, in an unexpected setting—a doctor’s office.

The ad, from medical technology company Hologic, depicted Blige in the swirling maelstrom of her busy career—and then, in a vulnerable position, sitting quietly in a hospital gown awaiting results of her annual well-woman visit. In a tense moment, she breathes a sigh of relief when the doctor tells her all is OK. It was a surprisingly impactful ad from the often lackluster medical category, but it stands out for another reason: it was the only game day spot directed by a Black woman. 

This year, Super Bowl commercials overall once again missed the mark in terms of diversity behind the camera. Child., the director of the Hologic ad, was one of just six female directors and one of at most six directors of color to helm spots for the game.

In total, at most 10 of 65 spots in Super Bowl LVI were shot by directors from the underrepresented groups of women and people of color, representing 15% of this year's in-game ads, and up just slightly from eight such ads in 2021. (Ad Age calculates Super Bowl figures based on commercials that ran nationally within the game—that is, the ones for which advertisers this year ponied up at least $6.5 million for a 30-second ad buy. Our figures are not exact as we could not confirm with all directors whether they identify as BIPOC.)

The low percentage of women and people of color underscores the dearth of opportunities for diverse talents in the director’s chair—especially for advertising’s biggest day of the year, when many brands avoid putting big dollars behind filmmakers who haven’t already proven themselves multiple times on that stage. 

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The Hologic ad was one of the exceptions. “During the year, agencies will reach out consistently, but when it comes down to the Super Bowl there’s a big drop in requests,” said Rhea Scott, founder of Little Minx, the production company that represents child., who has shot music videos for the likes of Doja Cat and Janelle Monae, as well as spots for brands including Johnnie Walker and Mastercard. Little Minx is female-owned and led and has been known for having a diverse roster composed of women and people of color since Scott founded the company in 1998.

The ad was conceived out of CHÉ Creative, a New York-based, Black-owned and led agency founded by Dabo Che, a vet of agencies including Translation, Spike DDB and Uniworld. 

Only two other Super Bowl spots in 2022 were solely shot by Black talents. One was the Crypto.com ad starring LeBron James, which was created out of a Black-owned and led firm, James’ own SpringHill Company. It was directed by Calmatic, who’s repped out of another diverse top shop, Prettybird, also female and POC-owned. The other was Google's ad, created with Gut, which featured images of various people of color—including Lizzo—to highlight its Pixel 6 phone's “Real Tone” technology able to accurately capture diverse skin tones. Division 7’s Joshua Kissi, who helped Google develop that tech, directed that ad. A third spot, the "Colosseum Tailgate" ad for Avocados from Mexico via GSD&M, was co-directed by playwright and performer Thaddeus McCants and David Shane of O Positive. 

Also read: Google puts diversity (and Lizzo) at the heart of its Big Game ad

Ali Brown, president of Prettybird, said her company saw numerous other Super Bowl boards, many of which ended up going to familiar, go-to Super Bowl directors. Outside of the Crypto.com ad directed by Calmatic, the company's director Kitao Sakurai, who is Japanese-born, helmed a pre-kickoff ad for McDonald’s via Wieden+Kennedy as well as a GoPuff "quartertime" stunt starring Lil' Dicky, from Mirimar. (Both of those, however, did not figure in Ad Age's tally since they were not officially in-game.)

“Brands have the opportunity on the biggest day in our business to make a statement, and the statement they made this year was, we’re still not really comfortable giving the job to somebody who hasn’t done a bunch of Super Bowl ads unless it's featuring Black talent," said Brown. 

Sophie Gold, founder and executive producer of production company Eleanor, is also chair of the best practices subcommittee of the AICP Equity & Inclusion Committee, which created a set of guidelines designed to help agencies and brands address barriers for diverse talents in production and postproduction.

Like Ad Age, Gold and her team tracked Super Bowl spots this year and charted the directors. Though her findings incorporated some spots that also ran regionally as well as not officially in-game, the stats were similarly low, showing four Black directors out of 78. “Napkin math will tell you that this means only 6% of Super Bowl spot directors were Black, which is not even halfway representative of the U.S. population of Black people at 14.2%,” she said. 

Gold also cited research from the 4As and 600andRising, which had calculated that of the 40,000 people who work in advertising, 6% are Black. Though a direct correlation can’t be proven, it’s an uncanny parallel with the directing figures. 

Little improvement

Though the percentage of ads shot by diverse directors remained low again this year, 2022 saw the numbers rise slightly. Last year, Ad Age found that only three women and five men of color directed spots in the game. 

Read: Super Bowl LV advertisers fall short on diversity in the director's chair.

Last year, no women of color directed game day ads. Along with child., 2022 directors included Chloé Zhao, who directed Budweiser’s Clydesdale spot, created out of Vayner Media. She’s repped out of Superprime for spots and is best known for her work on the 2021 Best Picture Oscar winner “Nomadland,” for which she became the first woman of color to win the Best Director Academy Award. Mexico-born Tania Verduzco, as part of directing duo Los Pérez, shot the Taco Bell ad. (Ad Age reached out to Verduzco to determine whether she considered herself P.O.C., but was unable to connect.)

Anheuser-Busch InBev was not only the game’s biggest advertiser, with six Super Bowl spots. It also had the most director diversity, with four of its ads directed by women, including one woman of color (Zhao). The other female directors it worked with were Georgia Hudson of Park Pictures, who helmed the Bud Light Next spot with a hidden NFT, as well as Rachel Morrison of Iconcolast, who shot the brand’s two bowling-themed commercials for Michelob Ultra.  

“For this year’s Super Bowl it was a clear goal we set among our teams and agency partners to push for representation and diversity in front of and behind the camera across all our films,” said Benoit Garbe, CMO of Anheuser-Busch. “We believe that marketing can be a catalyst for change, and Anheuser-Busch has the power and responsibility to help lead alongside others in the industry.” But the Super Bowl isn’t an “exception,” he added. “We always strive for inclusive representation in our creative. It’s not just the right thing to do, it’s the right thing for our business, so our brands reflect the world and the diversity of our consumers they serve."

Wieden+Kennedy, which had six spots in the game, also aimed to ensure diversity with its directorial talent this year. The agency’s New York head of integrated production, Nick Setounski, said that year-round, W+K makes concerted efforts to diversify behind the lens. “It is absolutely a priority for our production department and our producers to shift the tide of who we award jobs to,” he said. The agency starts even long before awarding the job to a diverse director—by ensuring that the bidding pool of talent on jobs is diverse as well. “We look for underrepresented directors—people of color and female directors—as a matter of course,” he said.

Along with the Michelob Ultra and Bud Light Next ads, the agency’s spot for TurboTax/Intuit, starring Jason Sudeikis, was shot by female director and artist Alex Prager, repped out of Arts & Sciences. Prager herself has beer cred—she had directed Anheuser-Busch’s “Welcome Back” spot that was part of the brand’s vaccine push last June, also via W+K, as well as Miller Lite’s weirdly fascinating holiday ad and art exhibit featuring white-collar holiday revelers, via DDB. 

That said, 10 spots with diverse directors compared to last year’s 8 doesn’t really represent progress, some say. “I feel it’s gotten worse because there was more awareness of the issue this past year than ever before," said Brown. "It was very pointed that last year was bad, but we’ve had a year of this conversation now and nothing changed, so actually, I think in a way, it’s worse than last year.”

Funny business

Production and agency execs tie the director diversity problem to the lack of opportunities for diverse talents endemic to the industry at large. One agency production vet observed that the lack of diverse talents behind the camera may correlate to the staple of Super Bowl advertising—comedy. The vet noted how most of the director diversity can be seen with visual spots, but in comedy, the genre is dominated by white men, many who hail from an advertising background.  

“Comedy-dialogue is still for whatever reason restricted to a dozen established white male creatives,” the vet observed. “Many of them are descendants of the advertising industry; usually there's a former creative director somewhere in there.” Comedy A-listers and go-to Super Bowl directors such as Matt Aselton, Bryan Buckley, Tom Kuntz, Jim Jenkins, David Shane and Stacy Wall got their starts as ad creatives. So even before they sat behind the camera, they got experience creating compelling 30-second stories that resonate with audiences. The same can’t be said of diverse talents in advertising. 

“When you look at the type of work that's done for the Super Bowl, usually, it’s bro humor,” adds Che. “There’s not diversity of thought, diversity of creative. I love ‘Cable Guy’ and Jim Carrey as much as the next guy, but we’re just recycling. If you’re going to have bro humor, then it makes sense that you hire those who understand that kind of humor.”

Little Minx Executive Producer Helen Hollien offered, “We need a quiet change, which might be seeing more high-caliber Black agency creatives.” 

“If you truly want to be diverse, you simply have to award the job to a diverse director,” said Eleanor's Gold. “What I've observed a lot is that the people who have the power to make the choice as to which director they can hire, they’re the very ones saying, ‘How do we become more diverse?’ It’s almost as if your child says, ‘Mommy, I want an ice cream,’ and the mom says, ‘I don’t even know how we’re gonna get the ice cream! We have to plot the route to the ice cream shop, come up with the $2, put together a 20-page deck and brainstorm about this ice cream.”

Production leaders including Little Minx's Scott acknowledge that a Super Bowl-sized job has a lot riding on it, so brand leaders want to feel as secure as possible and go with seasoned game day talents. There are ways to increase the comfort level around newer helmers, however. "The Super Bowl is one month in the year," Scott said. "There are 11 other months that agency producers and creatives can try out a relationship with a different director, to build trust. Then they can comfortably go to BIPOC directors for these big Super Bowl projects.”

Other avenues to make room for diverse talent include “Double the Line,” an initiative conceived by Prettybird’s Brown and backed by the AICP. "Double the Line" encourages agencies and clients to double the role of any single production position on a commercial bid and cover that cost, to allow a BIPOC talent to gain experience by working alongside the chosen candidate. 

Also read: Super Bowl ads show limited diversity and inclusion progress

For the livelihood of the industry, production vets say it’s crucial that directors who don’t have Super Bowl experience, diverse or not, get a shot. If the industry is only entrusting big-ticket spots to the most seasoned talents, “at some point, those guys are going to retire and then there’s going to be this huge vacuum,” Gold said. “A lot of diverse directors can’t even stay in the game long enough to get the experience that would allow them to be seen as worthy to be on the Super Bowl stage because they’ve got to pay their bills. If they pitch 10 projects and don’t get them, you say, ‘I’ve got to pivot; I’ve got to do something else.’

A new definition of ‘safe’

For advertisers who express wanting to go with “safe” directors who have previously directed Big Game ads, some observers suggest they broaden their views on what “playing it safe” means. 

The AICP E&I sub-committee guidelines encourage advertisers and agencies to be open to underrepresented talent because they may have come from established film and television careers.

Also, "factoring in the track record of a production company, aside from the individual director, is going to be critical in opening up that space," said Prettybird’s Brown. Gold agreed that seeking out talent from established production companies may be the additional safety net an agency or brand might need. “We’re not going to submit a director who’s just going to screw it up,” she said. “We’d get fired.”

It also might pay off to stretch beyond the traditional Super Bowl slapstick. “Bro humor isn’t the only way to entertain," said Che. "If you look at the biggest comedians in the world, the most popular music in the world, it’s from the culture. There is a place for Lay’s, Verizon, but there isn’t a balance. You can dimensionalize that. That's not to say that Black directors are only good to shoot commercials that have Black humor or Black music. We're diverse in our abilities, diverse in thought.”