The fourth All In Census will take place on 10 March 2027. The Advertising Association, the IPA, and ISBA, which run the cross-industry initiative, announced the date on 5 November and asked everyone working in UK advertising to set aside 15 minutes that day. A link to the survey follows in early March.
The census underpins the All In Action Plan, the industry’s programme to improve the experience and representation of the groups it has historically served least well. It has run three times, with 16,000 responses in 2021, 19,000 in 2023 and 14,000 in 2025. The AA calls it the largest survey of its kind in any advertising market. It is also the only dataset of any size on what practitioners think of their employers, their industry and, since 2025, the technology remaking their jobs.
The response count is the first number 2027 can improve
The announcement looks ahead rather than back. Responses grew by 3,000 between the first and second editions, then fell by around 5,000, roughly a quarter, between the second and third. The 2025 survey ran in March of that year, weeks into the American corporate retreat from diversity programmes and in an industry whose largest agency groups were reducing headcount. Nothing in the data shows whether either explains the dip, and the organisers want to know the direction from here. The more people answer, the more the results count, and the organisers have four months to get the number moving again.
The levers are the ones they have used before. The network of All In Champions, companies that have committed to implementing the action plan, has grown to more than 150 since 2021, and those firms are expected to push the survey internally. The sharper incentive is the benchmarking report. Member companies of the AA, IPA or ISBA that generate enough responses receive a confidential comparison of their own workforce’s answers against the industry dataset. For an HR director, that is the only independent read on whether the company’s inclusion numbers beat the market’s, and it works only for firms large enough to clear the threshold.
The 2025 results gave the plan something to show, and plenty left over
The dataset those firms would be measured against is the third census, published in May 2025, which recorded progress on the lines the action plan was built to move. Women held 46% of C-suite roles, up from 43% in 2023 and 39% in 2021. Respondents from an ethnic minority made up 18% of the sample, against 14% of the UK working population. The share of Black professionals saying they would leave the industry because of discrimination or a lack of inclusion fell from 30% to 24%; for Asian professionals, it moved from 21% to 19%. And 78% said they enjoyed working in advertising.
The same results set out the unfinished business. The share of Black practitioners considering leaving has fallen, and still stands at one in four. Discrimination was reported by 16% of Black respondents, 12% of Asian and Muslim respondents and 10% of women. Only 40% of respondents regarded their own industry as trustworthy and 44% thought it made a positive social contribution, a difficult pair of numbers for a business whose product is persuasion. The employee net promoter score, which measures whether staff would recommend the industry as a place to work, came in at +6, on a scale that runs from -100 to +100.
The eight current actions cover Black, Asian, disabled, working-class, older, female and LGBTQ+ talent, and mental health. The 2027 edition will be the first to measure two full cycles of the plan against the 2021 baseline, and the first to show whether the 2025 improvements were a trend or a single reading.
AI and the office are now the questions with the widest audience
The questions most likely to be read outside HR departments are the ones about how the work itself is changing. Sharon Lloyd Barnes, the AA’s inclusion lead and commercial director, frames the 2027 edition in those terms: “With the ongoing transformation of every business, there has never been a more important time to hear from the ad industry’s talent about their experience at work and their sentiment toward the work we collectively do.”
In 2025, 63% of respondents were enthusiastic about using AI more in their roles, and 15% were not. Some 44% said AI had already made them more effective at work; 22% disagreed. Regular use of generative AI for tasks split the industry almost evenly, 41% to 39%. Two years on, with every holding company selling clients an AI operating platform and restructuring its own workforce around one, the 2027 answers will show what that has done to the people inside. No other survey asks that many.
Hybrid working is the other line to watch. In 2025, the average respondent spent 2.6 days a week in the office and wanted 2.1. Several of the industry’s largest employers have since tightened attendance requirements. The 2027 census will record whether the gap between what staff want and what they get has widened, and whether the 59% who credited hybrid working with a better work/life balance still believe they have it.
Those two questions give the census a readership beyond HR, and a wider readership is the organisers’ most plausible route back above 14,000. All In exists to make advertising an industry that people from the groups in its action plan choose to stay in, and the measure of 2027 is whether that 24% falls again. The organisers will have the first result before any answer has been analysed: how many people gave up the 15 minutes. A second fall would leave the benchmarking reports, the action plan and the title of largest survey of its kind all resting on a smaller base.