Free The Bid: How the Bid Got Bigger

What inspired the launch of Free The Bid in 2016?

Free The Bid began when I spoke to Mashable in July 2016 about the appallingly low number of women directors hired for commercial jobs. I was the first woman director to direct a Stella Artois campaign. I was fed up with hearing statistics like this on nearly every job I booked. Because of that article, my friend PJ Pereira, CCO & co-founder of Pereira & O’Dell, decided to include at least one woman director in the bidding process for every job at his agency from then on. I decided to take the idea one step further, bringing Free The Bid to life in September 2016 as a non-profit initiative. Other than the pledge, the main idea was that we needed a place where work by international women directors could be searched by skillset and location, and promoted to ad agencies and brands.

How does Free The Bid operate on a day-to-day basis and who’s in the team?

The Free The Bid team is tiny. Each of us does the work of about 20 people, which is how we’ve managed to accomplish an incredible amount in such a short space of time. Initially, I attempted to run the entire thing, but it grew at an impossible rate so in January 2017 I brought on executive director Emma Reeves and head of content Chloe Coover.

Emma helps spread the word – speaking about FTB on panels and events such as the Unstereotype Alliance, a knowledge-sharing session launched by UN Women and Unilever. She also holds meetings with agencies and brands to get them to pledge and develops relationships with our international ambassadors. Without Emma’s commitment and vision for Free The Bid, we wouldn’t have been able to rack up pledges from top marketers like Diageo and expand our advocacy for women into roles beyond the director’s chair (we now represent editors and DPs as well).

Chloe handles all our content across social media. She publishes interviews with directors twice a week and collates our quarterly newsletter, Here’s The Work, which rounds up the last three months’ work from women in our database.

The team, along with part-time helpers, also maintains Free The Bid’s database, home to hundreds of profiles of women directors and editors, including links to sites for women DP collectives. We want to work with emerging women directors by giving them industry knowledge and connecting them with like-minded women.

Above: Free The Bid founder Alma Har'El

Free The Bid now has a presence in five continents. At what point did you realise that it had become a movement in its own right?

Probably when I saw our sister pages on Instagram for Free The Bid Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Australia. They’re all run by local women directors. When I directed a commercial in Mexico, I met with some of our ambassadors there. We’re like a family of rebels when we meet. Our cause is simple: to create opportunity for an untapped pool of talent. 

Free The Bid operates as a non-profit initiative. How is it funded?

Our frugal operating expenses are currently covered by donations. Initially, our funding was provided by pledged FTB brand, HP, which allowed me to build the website and put the team together. Last year, HP re-committed to the cause with a second year’s contribution. We’re grateful for the generosity of CMO Antonio Lucio. Other pledged brands, like Visa and LinkedIn, and agencies such as BBDO, gyro and Fred & Farid, have also contributed financially, along with numerous production and editing houses.

We’re developing plans to ensure stable funding. We’d like to launch a membership model to enable people to participate in specialist events for women directors and provide them with more access to our site’s internal data.

Why was it important to get all sectors of the industry involved?

It’s difficult to pinpoint any specific sector as being more or less resistant to our efforts. The interconnected parts of the industry behave like dominoes; it’s easier to get movement in one sector once you’ve achieved momentum in another. Frankly, as long as there is systemic gender bias in any sector, it will be mirrored and reinforced across all parts of the industry. Freeing the bid for women and creating a level playing field firstly involves identifying the fact that there’s a large ecosystem of inequality at work that shuts women out.

What are you doing to get new recruits to sign up to Free The Bid?

Luckily, word has gone around about us, so we receive a lot of voluntary inquiries from agencies and brands wanting to get involved. Contrary to what some may believe, pledging is not a one-step process and there’s a rigour to getting new pledges on board that we take very seriously. And of course we target agencies on the fringes of our network. This is a very interconnected industry and people do introduce us to potential pledgers. Since we began, momentum has continued, which is encouraging.

How are you measuring the success of Free The Bid and how are participants held accountable to their pledges?

Agencies who have pledged – like BBDO and CP+B – have revealed that the number of female directors they’ve hired has increased by 400 per cent. Once women are through the pitching door, the exposure enables them to land all sorts of jobs even in traditionally male-dominated industries, like automotive. We often get directors thanking us for the uptake in work since the initiative started.

We also try to make sure all sectors are involved in holding each other accountable for providing equal opportunities. When brands have taken the pledge, agencies are given added incentive to make their pledge a priority or else they risk losing major clients.

“I was the first woman to direct a Stella Artois ad. I was fed up with hearing statistics like this” - Alma Har'el, director and Free The Bid founder 

How have initiatives like #MeToo and Time’s Up Advertising affected FTB?

We’ve seen company reshuffles and more women being promoted at agencies following the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. This means more inclusivity and more opportunities for introducing Free The Bid.

You’ve expanded to include women editors and DPs in your database. What plans do you have going forward?

We’ve also expanded to include women in [specialist fields such as] VR, AR, AI and live-streaming and we’re looking to encompass TV. We want to tackle hiring biases beyond the ad industry and to advocate for women in all production roles. I’m currently directing a feature and I’ve seen how much energy is needed to activate the hiring of women and people of colour. We want to make it easier for people who find it hard to move forward.