Paul David, CEO - Literal Humans

Literal Humans Jan '25

Literal Humans is a full-service digital marketing agency founded in 2020. The agency offers a full-stack solution with a human-to-human approach, delivered by a truly diverse team of experts. Born out of lockdown, Literal Humans is based in London but has team members working from all corners of the world.

We interviewed founder and CEO Paul David to learn more about the lack of diversity across creative sector agencies, as well as why having a truly diverse and inclusive company is so important. We also explored the holistic approach that Literal Humans takes to EDI, and how the entire team is devoted to making things better, for all.

What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion within your organisation?

My reasons for addressing diversity, equity and inclusion in my organisation are fewfold. Firstly, in previous roles, I didn’t always feel comfortable, supported, or well-equipped to do my job well. Now, I’ve got the reins and can change the leadership. It’s coming from a very personal place.

Secondly, I think it just makes good sense, and it’s the right thing to do. And thirdly, the data and research tells us that it's not only the right thing to do, but an effective thing to do to significantly increase your business performance. And we’re seeing that in the creative industries—it’s amazing to see the meeting of minds, perspectives, and backgrounds working to produce better outcomes in content and creativity for our clients. It’s really gratifying.

How are these motivations and your focus on EDI embedded across the organisation?

I’d say they’re embedded across the organisation in several ways. It starts with making EDI a top-line priority for leadership, tracking it as a key metric, and integrating it into our recruitment process. We work with recruiters and run our own recruitment for roles to really try and make sure that the initial pool of resumes that we’re pulling from is diverse. We reach out to niche messaging boards and work with a few recruiters, like Creative Good, who specialise in EDI recruitment. A focus on EDI is really important to us and is embedded in our creative processes and systems.

When we have clients with global audiences, having that recruitment filter means we’ve got a diverse execution team to represent those different backgrounds.

We had a money transfer client based in Africa who came to us to run their content strategy, and we were able to give them two writers who are both from the African continent: one was a diasporic African living in Canada, who was actively sending money home to his family, and the other was based full-time in Zimbabwe. The fact that we had members of our team who were the real audience for the project made it so much better. We were able to communicate more effectively with our clients’ customers and really supercharge that content strategy with cultural nuance.

Do you have any particular organisation goals around EDI?

We do, certainly. Some of the organisational goals we have are around making sure that the entire team is trained in understanding neurodiversity. We all need to understand that across the life cycle of our organisation, we will have neurodivergent team members, and we need to make sure that the space we’ve created for them is a comfortable one that provides the accommodations they need to be successful. We’re building a curriculum of training that will roll that out as a thread of professional development and learning throughout the organisation to address this.

We also have goals for what our board and senior leadership needs to look like in the organisation. The majority of the organisation is made up of women, which we’re really proud of and which is different from a lot of creative agencies. If your leadership team is exclusively white or male, or something like that, set the metrics to grow in the other direction so you can broaden the membership of your team and diversify it. That’s really important.

In addition, we look at who we work with, making sure we’re not just going for a specific type of client. As an example, we could just work with “FinTech bros” who are traditionally white, privately educated, with a lot of money. But we need to have diversity within our clientele, and it’s a factor we always take into consideration.

What are the risks that you perceive for not addressing EDI in your business or sector?

I think there are loads of risks. Showing up as less culturally responsive and culturally relevant is one. You see a lot of agencies now use the word culture in their unique selling proposition and they say: “We’re here to deliver cultural insights and creativity that’s driven by deep cultural knowledge.” That’s really powerful. For example, the famous Nike “Nothing Beats a Londoner” campaign has an incredible mosaic of all the different London subcultures—from the kid who’s playing football with his mates, to the guy at the Old Goose, or the woman who works in tech at Silicon Roundabout. That’s all captured there.

I think you’re at a real risk of not reflecting your clients’ audiences if you as an agency aren’t investing in that diversity across your team and making sure that folks are included. There are massive PR implications to getting this wrong. Like the H&M ad where they put the little Black boy in a jumper that says something about being the coolest monkey in the jungle. Who approved that?! There wasn’t enough representation, equity, and inclusion in that organisation to make sure that that didn’t happen. It had a major cost for H&M.

So I think that not addressing EDI brings PR costs, actual financial costs, as well as team satisfaction costs. Our team members say that this is a wonderful place to work and I think our team appreciates coming to work every day with an incredibly diverse set of colleagues. They learn something from their colleagues every single day. It’s a more intellectually stimulating, engaging environment than one where everyone’s the same, or everyone went to the same type of university, for example.

What are your main approaches to EDI?

The biggest area where we’ve seen impact is through recruitment and nurturing the team that we have. We’ve been able to create an incredibly rich and diverse team through this. I often get asked by other founders: “How did you do it? How can I do it?” They’re sort of backing into the problem. I think you have to really think about doing it with intention from the start. And if you haven’t, how do you make inroads?

I’d say the big thing is setting that intentionality at the leadership level, and then setting a plan, just like you would any other strategy. If we’re so intentional about the project management of products and services, why can’t we be similarly intentional about diversity and our goals around that? We should be setting that intention at the leadership level and then executing it at an operational level.

What’s the problem that working with that intentionality meant to address?

I think there’s a problem around willingness and willpower, and just committing to that intention and having leadership that says: “We are going to manage this thing. We have to make this a key priority and we’re going to put this on our dashboard.” We have diversity metrics on our leadership dashboard that we look at every single month. We had a hard look at our board and found that it wasn’t representative of the communities we represent. Now, we have four women on board — two of whom are women of colour—and that was from a board where we had four men, one of whom was a man of colour—me. We did a complete transformation in less than a year and brought in some amazing talent from Climate Action, Universal Music Group, Edelman, and others.

It’s about saying that we’ve got this challenge when it comes to EDI, and deciding what we’re going to do about it. We’re going to set goals and a pathway to do it, and I think that’s something we’ve done really effectively.

Who are you aiming your EDI activity at and where within your organisation are you seeing the biggest levers for making change?

It’s aimed at the leadership team—the executives and founders—they’re the ones who drive it. I think a lot of leaders and founders face challenges in this area, as building a truly diverse organization can feel deeply personal and difficult. If your own personal and professional networks lack diversity, then it’s a personal challenge to get out there and address a problem that exists within you and your own social circle and identity. This can create a barrier to building an organisation that respects and practices EDI in the truest sense at every level. It’s a very confronting idea that I think prevents a lot of leaders from building truly diverse and inclusive workplaces.

How are you bringing your leaders and board around to wanting to share your journey of change, particularly those coming from a less diverse demographic?

It starts with having a compelling vision and destination—one that motivates people to join you on the journey. For us, that vision is to be the leading agency for tech for good organisations, for charities, and for any mission-driven brand out there. We want them to adopt our human-to-human (H2H) marketing and growth strategy, which integrates EDI principles such as bravery, cultural relevance, and inclusion, while also fostering creative confidence and maintaining a strong focus on ROI.

Our 10-year goal is to have millions of people running on this H2H marketing model. So that’s our clients, podcast listeners, and people who read our blogs and white papers. That’s a compelling vision that’s leading to a shift in the marketing landscape, and it’s a generational change.

Having a compelling vision that people want to get on board with brings a lot of people from different sectors and backgrounds together, because it’s something they can all agree on. It’s a vision that excites all of them, which crosses lines of difference and says we all have a common dream.

What are the key elements that made this approach successful for you?

Cultural and operational practices are crucial. We run a four-day work week which is helpful for a lot of people. It’s helpful for parents and neurodiverse people, as well as those who maybe have caregiving responsibilities. We really do our best to give people that extra day off work, as well as giving them a day of remote working.

Also, talking about it, and learning in public. When there were protests in the UK—including in London—it wasn’t safe to be a person of colour walking around during that time. I said to a client that one of our team members wouldn’t be able to make it for the in-person meeting, due to being a woman of colour. I didn’t feel safe asking her to come into London for it, so we ran the session remotely for that very reason. The client totally understood and was grateful that I communicated that with them. I also shared it with the wider community on LinkedIn, that I had done something I never thought I would have to do as a CEO, period, let alone in 2024—to tell a team member of colour to stay home because of race riots.

Another thing is setting benchmarks and goals for yourself. You don’t need to necessarily align yourself with organisations that are knocking it out of the park; you just need to be 1% better than you were last year when it comes to this stuff. You’re competing against yourself in a lot of ways, so set goals and metrics like you would do with anything else. Avoid letting EDI become a vague commitment that just ticks a box for PR and marketing because people can see right through that.

On the back end, you should be analysing and discussing these goals with your teams, and asking if the organisation feels like a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace. If not, then why not, and what can be done better?

As a small business how do you prioritise resource to implement your EDI activity?

We are an early-stage business with a team of 11 people. The resources that we have committed to this are primarily leadership time and commitment. This includes talking about it, measuring it, and making it a priority, which is a fair chunk of our time.

We’re also writing about EDI and putting out content that’s sort of flying the flag that this is a wonderful place to work and is a place that cares about these issues. As a team, we’ve all completed behavioural science training and part of that included some thinking about EDI and the emotional and psychological impacts of experiences in the workplace. The training required an hour of attention each week, from each team member, over a month and a half. We try to keep our resources lean, but also have it sprinkled throughout everything we do.

How do you know that this approach works for improving diversity and inclusion in your organisation?

Firstly, our growth as an agency speaks for itself. We’re retaining clients, which is a testament to the success of our approach. Our clients love working with us and consistently choose to renew their partnerships. On top of that, we continue to attract new clients—an essential measure of success for any agency. In short, the results are clear: we’ve proven the effectiveness of our approach by putting it into practice.

Secondly, a little bit deeper, is what we produce for our clients. We’ve had campaigns for major FinTech companies, providing market research in places like North America, Asia, and Europe. Because our team is so diverse and can understand those parts of the world based on cultural backgrounds, they can input this into the work and connect with the dozens of people we interview for those research projects. It’s both in the input and the outcome.

It really operates on multiple levels, both internally and externally. But I think the biggest thing is that we persist. We’re profitable, we’re growing, and we’ve been invested in by organisations like Creative UK. There’s so many proof points we’ve seen along the journey, and we’re grateful for those.

What’s got in the way of your EDI journey within your organisation?

I think it’s important for EDI leaders to be transparent and open about this stuff, because it’s not an easy road. There are challenges but it’s the right road to be on. I think one thing is something that all employers face, which is pipeline challenges. We need writers, designers, growth experts to think of themselves as people who could be agency team members. It’s why I go to programmes like Regenerate London, and I talk to young people about branding and marketing careers, because that, hopefully, fills up the pipeline. So now, I’ve got young people from that programme who want to do work experience at my agency.

Another challenge is overcoming the traditional workplace culture, where people are often expected to leave their identities at the door and focus solely on their work. At our agency, we use a performance management system called 15Five to check in on how our team members are feeling on any given day, encouraging managers to embrace the personal aspects of their team members' lives. In a world that often forces employees to compartmentalise their identities, prioritising EDI requires confronting and addressing these deeply ingrained challenges.

What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar initiatives or going on a similar journey?

I think it’s twofold: get help and make it everyone’s priority. I think too often organisations try to hire a chief diversity officer, whatever that means. But that’s not the way to do this. It needs to be everyone’s responsibility.

You have to start by starting. So, you have to create an initially appealing enough environment that’s going to attract diverse talent and get them excited about your cause. That means you can’t whitewash your organisation and then expect a bunch of people of colour to join it just because you have “good intentions”.

As much as organisations shouldn’t greenwash or culture wash, it’s also important for employees to bring something to the table, culture wise. How are employees going to add to our culture and supercharge it with the kind of values that they want to see? This could be organising team events where we learn about Diwiali, for example, or any other cultural or neurodiverse background. I think we need to stop thinking about culture as a one-way street that’s delivered to employees by the company’s leadership and think of it as a collective journey that we’re all on to make our workplaces better. Was it Peter Drucker who said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”? You can have an amazing strategy, but if you don’t have the culture that underlies it to execute and inform the strategy, then you're not going to get the results you want.

It’s an experiment. Can a London-based organisation founded by a Black American who used to be an educator, running a four-day work week, working with only mission-driven companies, with an incredibly diverse team and a focus on EDI exist and compete with other agencies? It’s a happy experiment that we’re trying to prove works and, luckily, we’re proving it.