Closing Keynote: Women And People Of Color In Advertising: Here’s What You Do Next

Frustrated by the incremental rate of change in the ad industry, Cindy Gallop wants to see ACTION. Change happens from the bottom up, not the top down. Cindy tells you what you can do, immediately, to transform your working life, your career path, your opportunities, and the future of our industry, together.

For the fifth year in a row, Cindy Gallop returned to The 3% Conference stage to deliver the closing keynote in a way that only she can—with her trademark combination of humor, unapologetic candor, and enough F-bombs to have played buzzword bingo. And true to form, Gallop brought her unique style to a packed theater of conference goers.

Frustrated by the incremental rate of change in the ad industry, Cindy Gallop wanted to see ACTION. Change happens from the bottom up, not the top down, she maintained. Her charge was to share what we can do, immediately—to transform our working life, our career path, our opportunities, and the future of our industry, together.

Forget the idea of "see it, be it" but rather "if you don't see it, be it."

Gallop called on all women to start their own agency. And laid out her 10-step process for how to get started. Here are the key takeaways:

1. You don't need money to start the agency of the future. But you do need to drastically cut back your expenses by identifying your minimum viable cost of living. "You can totally half your cost of living" she argued.
2. Know that you're extremely good at things you don't know you're extremely good at. We need to develop the skill of bullshitting which men are totally good at. "When you start to feel yourself bullshitting, know that you are only half as good as men who do this all the time and all too well."
3. Blue sky it. What Do YOU really want to do? Here Gallop suggested that the sky's the limit and that the world has yet to see the glory days of advertising, the future belongs to whomever claims it.
4. Design your business to be the way you want to work. Citing an article in the Globe & Mail in May 2016 on Heidi Hackemer, Founder of brand shop Wolf & Wilhelmine, Gallop said you could redesign a way an agency works from the ground up. You are now the architect of your work hours, the agency culture and who you work with.
5. Design your business model to be the way you want to make money. What are we here for folks? To make f'ing money! So ask yourself, "How would I like to make money?" Build your model around results achieved, not hours worked.
6. Design your business from day one, to one day ultimately make a lot of money. Gallop quoted The Drum who spoke with Rob Dickson and Donna Grato from R&D Venture Partners: No matter what the circumstances, every good agency can sell itself.
7. You can start the agency of the future alongside your current job. Without encouraging people to steal clients, Gallop urged us to leverage our co-workers as future contacts, business partners, employees. Use the resources around you to jump start your business.
8. Plenty of people want to fund your business. There has never been a better time to get funding as female entrepreneurs. A quick online search will yield many companies waiting to fund women. Gallop provided a short list: You & Mr Jones, Brava Investments and iFundWomen.com.
9. Your clients are all around you. Start talking to people around you. They're your new clients, Gallop urged.
10. Make it real. Open a social media account, buy the domain name, and talk about your company to anyone who will listen. Make your company real and create real accountability.

Practicing what she preached, Cindy Gallop slipped in an advertisement for her startup, Make Love Not Porn. She closed the keynote by urging us to go home and take action toward launching our own agencies. Then, she left us with something to consider,

“There is a huge amount of money to be made out of taking women seriously."