Who Gets the Light?

By Christina Connerton

Artwork by Courtney Wells

Advertising is like a special little club. So much of what happens inside of it is so uniquely it. And within it, we’ve established our norms–late night client dinners, early morning testing results, pitch decks, production timelines, tightening budgets, faster, more, now. It’s made us experts at problem solving on the fly. It’s why creatives flourish here; we thrive in the controlled chaos.

As someone who was late-diagnosed (and I mean, compellingly, alarmingly late) with ADHD, the reliability of our go-go-go-make-make-make-now-now-now mentality gives me the dopamine hits my silly, fleshy, little brain requires.

But.

Like with anything, when norms are established, changes to the norm are often ignored. If something is working, why change it? If it’s not broke and all that. And with the reins being tightened in every direction, brands fearing audience alienation, and a tenuous political climate–it’s a touch Third Reich out there–change feels a whole lot like risk. We just don’t have the time or the money or the mental capacity for anything other than a done deal.

But we’re all creative, right? That’s like our thing. We don’t shut up about creativity being king. We lament about it, brag about it, write sonnets on LinkedIn about it. We’re like one bad pitch away from quoting Taylor Swift’s Eldest Daughter about our terminal uniqueness and drowning ourselves in a Mad Men-style martini about it. (I find us annoyingly adorable.)

So much of creating relies on us breaking norms, even when it’s inconvenient, even when it comes with a cost. And sometimes the norm we have to break is our own comfort, our own superiority, our own ways of working.

What I’m talking about is visibility politics. At a time when the norm (read: WASP) is more in style than ever and DEI is being systematically gutted, we, as creative leaders in this industry and in pop culture, need to push back. Sometimes that means actively pursuing progress within our field and in the work we put out. It means shining a light on people who have been historically marginalized and letting them bloom.

**

I didn’t think I’d end up in advertising.

When I was 21 I had that kind of art school arrogance that can only be bought and cultivated for $60,000/year (dance major at NYU, what’s up). A coworker at my serving job (did you hear me? I said dance major at NYU) was bartending after having lost his first-ever design job at an advertising agency due to an unexpected illness taking over his life.

By the time I met him, his health was back to normal but his career path was not. And he talked about his former job a lot. At the time, I didn’t have the worldliness to truly understand the intersection of disability and creativity–and to be fair, neither did he. Instead, he focused on making sure we knew he was an art director, and an artist, and a really hard worker, and definitely not going to be a bartender forever. And I focused on how annoying all of that was.

At that point in time, I was a healthy dancer slash server slash canonically heartbroken poet. And, of course, a white woman (still that). The inherent privilege I had in my body meant that I could walk around believing myself a radical without ever really needing to confront what that meant. My worldview was limited to what I had always known to be immovable.

Things changed, though. I switched careers in 2016 and moved to LA to work as a production coordinator at an ad agency. I spent enough time bugging people with increasingly desperate quips like “hey did you know I’m a writer, too?” and “I wrote really bad poetry about an ex you could take a look at,” that eventually I was asked to work on a pitch deck, then a pitch, then a campaign.

I came into my own as a creative in advertising in 2018 at exactly the same time I became disabled by chronic illness. And honestly? I am so lucky it happened that way.

Not because I’m weird or optimistic (the universe cannot have a divine plan that involves me undergoing annual colonoscopies, I’m sorry) but because to move through the world disabled–or as anything other than white, cis, straight, male, able-bodied, housed, christian-ish–requires adaptability and creativity to navigate systems that often do not bend to, make room for, or accommodate you. (Unless, of course, you work at SuperBloom, which accommodates and makes room for all of my everything.)

Creativity became the worldview–like when people go and do ayahuasca and say they’ve been enlightened, except real.

**

Molly Burke, a blind disability activist and influencer, once explained how we attempt to cure blindness and it really put things into perspective for me. There are like–I don’t know–50, 100, 200 ways you can go blind. (I tried to find the exact number. All I got is that it’s a lot.) Now, it’s the inclination of the public to invest in finding a cure for blindness–a noble and worthy cause. However, knowing that there are many, many different causes, it also seems reflected in the science that there are many, many different ways to tackle finding their potential cures. And while there are thousands of studies every year focused on vision restoration, there is still no specific cure for blindness. And yet, we persist.

You know what we don’t attempt with equal sincerity, despite how simple it would be to implement alongside these scientific efforts?

Image descriptions on social media posts so blind users utilizing screen readers (which can pick up captions but cannot decipher what’s in an image) can understand what’s posted.

It sounds so silly. It’s just social media. It’s not like finding a cure for blindness or anything. But… you use it every day, right? We market on it all year long. The majority of the work I do ends up only on socials. Have you ever had a client require an image description in their captions? I haven’t. Have you ever asked for it to be included? I haven’t.

This simple accommodation not only helps our blind audiences have access to social media, but it helps advertisers get their (our!) message across to more people. According to the CDC, there are over 7 million people in the United States with vision impairment, 1 million with blindness. That’s a lot of people we’re leaving out.

And, listen, I don’t think anyone in the industry is leaving blind people–or anyone, for that matter–out on purpose. This is just an example of what creative problem solving could do when we understand that a problem exists in the first place. There is more than curing blindness to solve for a blind social media user, but it’s not surprising that sometimes we don’t think of it.

Society has kind of conditioned us to forget, ignore, or unsee people outside of the status quo. The Ugly Laws–municipal ordinances that prohibited people with disabilities and disfigurements from appearing in public–were not fully repealed until the 1970s. And there are large swaths of the population who believe it’s more polite to say they don’t see color rather than work towards being anti-racist. Both of these examples exist on the premise that not seeing the difference will make the difference go away, whereas acknowledging the difference requires the seer to act on an injustice. To get creative.

The same goes for the work place.

A friend of mine was recently laid off from his job because he was unable to be in-office for more than two days a week due to his disabling Long COVID. His company was requiring him to come in more often, not because his duties depended on it, but because being in-office fulltime was the normal thing to do. Rather than accommodate him creatively, they got rid of him.

Since 2023, return-to-office mandates have taken off, leaving many disabled people–some who were able to hold steady work for the first time during lockdowns thanks to work-from-home accommodations–in the dust. The gender wage gap has also increased since then, with women leaving the work force or taking pay cuts in order to balance home and work life.

The sad part here is that we already saw and experienced the creative solution to these problems. Many places, including SuperBloom (hey girl), have adopted it–hybrid models with flexibility for people’s individual needs. But many companies are determined to return to normal, even if that means losing some of the most creative minds out there.

Envisioning a world where our most vulnerable, marginalized, or forgotten are safe and visible is the most radical, most creative mindset you can have. But it doesn’t have to be–and shouldn’t, and isn’t–only possible for people on the outside.

I was wrong when I was annoyed at my friend for constantly talking about the job he lost to illness. He deserved to shine a light on it as much as he wanted. And I wish I had been open to what it revealed before I became disabled myself. But, this worldview can be all of ours, identity aside, as long as we start thinking (and hiring, and making) with breaking norms in mind. You know, like creatives.

Like with all civil rights movements–when we acknowledge, fight for, and include the most marginalized among us, we all benefit. In the most capitalistic of terms, that means our creative work gets better. It’s made by voices with worldviews that are different and more expansive than ours. It’s more thorough, fuller, interesting, deviant, eye-catching. It sees the world for how it really is and imagines something better. It pulls the weeds out of our archaic foundations and plants seeds for something new.

In the most human of terms, it means we get to be the kind of creatives, and people, we all claim to be. People who lean into the sun to unearth our unconscious biases. People who consider others, accommodate differences, and know that we are made better when we all have a chance to bloom.