Page 40 - ADNews magazine March-April 2022

Profile
Working for a
“I feel a bit awkward to admit it, but I wasn't really interested in adver- tising at all,” she says.
“After Pro Arte, I was hell bent on going to the UK with my friends and pouring beers in a pub while I ‘found myself’.
better industry
“My mum was having none of it and convinced me to try out a year at AAA School of Advertising. I was hooked immediately. I found it by sheer luck.”
Van der Merwe’s first role in the industry was as an art direction intern at Ogilvy Johannesburg. At the time, van der Merwe was the only female art direction intern and shared the office with six other men.
M&C Saatchi’s Mandie van der Merwe has been named AdNews Emerging Leader. We chat with her about her career, challenges for the industry, and future goals.
Mandie van der Merwe didn’t always intend on joining the advertising industry but was imme- diately hooked when she landed her first role as an intern.
The South-African born creative began her career at
Ogilvy in 1999. Since then,
she has climbed to the top
of creative departments, acted as a mentor, and was recently named AdNews Emerging Leader.
Van der Merwe’s career spans three countries, working in her home country of South Africa, as well as Bahrain and now Australia. She spent the beginning of her childhood in Durban, a creative hub in South Africa.
“Then my family moved to Pretoria, now Tshwane, which was a real culture shock - Afrikaans-speakers, conserva- tives... and a handful of racists,” van der Merwe says.
“I went to so many schools but I found my people at Pro Arte. It’s a specialisation school for the arts that has produced so many incredi- bly talented artists, musicians, danc- ers and performers. I’m still friends with quite a few of the graduates from my year and I do get teased for going ‘full commercial’.”
While in school, van der Merwe was interested in geography and biology, but spent half of her school day studying fine art sub- jects such as printmaking, graphic design, sculpture, and painting. After convincing from her mum, van der Merwe attended the AAA School for Advertising in 1998.
“There were some good humans in that group,” she says. “But it was very much a bro culture.
“It was a misogynistic culture that was unwelcoming. I had an exec- utive creative director turn up the air conditioning once during a review and then commented a little later I was clearly wearing a padded bra. Not what you’re hoping for in your first year of work.”
The advertising industry still has issues around gender equality, which van der Merwe has been passionate about improving throughout her career. There has been some progress. For example, during her time as national head of AWARD School, which van der Merwe had to shift online during the pandemic, 60% of successful applicants were female, up 11% from 2019, 69% of the top 10 students nationally were female, up 15% from 2019 and 34% of the tutors were female, up 6% from 2019.
“I’d love to take the credit but attracting more female applicants has been a focus of the Advertising Council Australia for several years now,”
van der Merwe says.
“My predecessor, Karen Ferry, did tremendous work to set up
processes for AWARD School that made gender diversity a priority. Esther Clerehan was really influential in helping us develop the strategy to get to those numbers. Jack Nunn is an incredibly good
lateral thinker and was constantly challenging the old ways of doing things.” For van der Merwe, chasing higher levels of diversity will improve the
quality of work the industry is able to put out.
“This industry is at its best when we are pushing the edges of our
frames of reference,” she says.
“The problem with a monocultural, homogenous industry, is that our
frames of reference become extremely narrow. We become limited by the relatively one-dimensional nature of our shared experiences, histories and heritages. My goal is creativity – not just for me, but for everyone. And for that to happen, we need more women, more people of colour, more LGBTQIA+ individuals, more people who have a dramatically dif- ferent experience of life to help us push the edges.”
She argues the industry must move beyond talking about gender equal- ity and work on boosting the number of women in senior positions,
WORDS BY
MARIAM CHEIK-HUSSEIN