The Creative Moment Podcast: Mark Runacus MBE, co-founder of creative agency Wax/On and the joint chief executive of Outvertising

On the Creative Moment podcast this week I'm talking to Mark Runacus MBE.Mark is the co-founder of creative agency Wax/On and the joint chief executive of Outvertising, which is a volunteer-run UK-based network of LGBTQ+ people working in the creative industries.Mark talks about role models past and present, discrimination in the workplace and his history at Karmarama.Here’s what I asked Mark:One of the key elements of your work with Outvertising is to try and create role models for the LGBTQ+ community and one of the ways that you are trying to do this is to increase the diversity of people appearing in adverts. Just talk me through why role models in this context are so important?So when was the first advert that featured a gay man?It's got to the slightly embarrassing stage where there tends to be a token non-white person in lots of adverts, hasn't it? We really should be a bit beyond that now.When we spoke before you quoted some research that said that half of 18 to 24 year-olds don't identify as 100% straight. Society is changing rapidly, isn't it?That has some big implications for the creative marketing sector, doesn't it?What role do you think advertising needs to play in that societal change?Talk to me about Outvertising's mentor scheme and how people can get involved with it?What are the stats on LGBTQ+ people experiencing discrimination in the workplace?Moving on from that to your time at Karmarama, you were chief strategy officer there when it was bought by Accenture. What was your experience of working as a creative person for a management consultancy business?When we chatted before you said that "creatives forgot about the importance of the channel about 25 years ago", what did you mean by that?Why is it that you've decided to focus primarily on scale-up businesses at Wax On?