Invisible Creatives launches online mentorship program, Mentor-at-home

inVisible Creatives, a platform that promotes female creative talent that was created to help fix the gender ratio in the advertising industry, launches new mentorship initiative Mentor-at-Home.

Mentor-at-Home is an online, speed-dating style event where five mentees are matched with  five mentors. Conducted on Zoom, each event starts with a group introduction, after which five mentee-mentor duos are each assigned a break-out room. Halfway through the one-hour session, the mentee switches mentors. A group discussion finalizes the session.

So far, mentors have included McCann’s Global ECD Maru Kopelowicz; iCrossing’s Executive Creative Director and creator of Better Man Cards Frederic Bonn; Fishbowl’s Brand & Community Director Mara Lecocq; and FCB’s Global Director of Innovation Kris Hoet.

“Creatives are forever asking us to match them with mentors, but much like in the dating world, mentorship relies on chemistry. We give talent access to many mentors so they can find their soulmate. We believe every conversation teaches both the mentee and the mentor something,” says founder and freelance Creative Director Maddy Kramer.

In the knowledge that the availability of mentorship isn’t equitable, inVisible Creatives’s mission is to make mentorship more accessible. “We believe that the lack of visibility, not talent, is one of the biggest barriers to progress. inVisible Creatives already aims to make female creatives more visible through our database, job boards and content, and Mentor-at-Home is an extension of that,” adds Kramer. “The timing for the launch was perfect, with so many people either out of a steady job, like myself, or just really wanting to give back during these crazy times.”

With Mentor-at-Home, inVisible Creatives is expanding their definition of invisibility. “Our plan is to partner with different initiatives, awards shows and organisations to give anyone from junior creatives to ECDs an opportunity to receive mentorship, so it’s not just for those in their first industry roles. All sorts of creatives who feel invisible for multitudes of reasons have come to us, asking to be mentored. We want to give anyone who needs it this opportunity. We also have sessions in Spanish and Portuguese and are open to including other languages,” adds Senta Slingerland, who joined inVisible Creatives as a partner in 2019. Her and Maddy met in 2015 when Maddy was a participant of Cannes Lions’s ‘See It Be It’, a programme for the advancement of female creative leaders that Senta founded during her eight years with the festival.

Those interested in being a part of Mentor-at-Home can sign up here.

inVisible Creatives launched in 2018 to help address the lack of female creative leadership in the advertising agencies. The platform aims to make underrepresented talent more visible, to help them to get hired and promoted.

Maddy Kramer is the founder of inVisible Creatives and an ACD Art Director. In 2019, AdWeek recognised her among 40 other amazing women as one of the “trailblazers breaking down barriers and opening opportunities for others”. In 2018 the One Show named her “The Next Creative Leader”. In 2015, Maddy was part of the second edition of the Cannes Lions’s See it Be it programme.

Senta Slingerland is a partner of inVisible Creatives, an independent brand strategist and founder of City.Shapers, a consultancy that matches people shaping culture with brands who want to. She is the former Director of Brand Strategy for the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where she launched See It Be It, a programme for the advancement of female creative leaders.