A spreadsheet created for advertising industry employees to share their salaries is going viral

• Cole Habersham, an account director at ad agency R/GA, posted an agency salaries spreadsheet on Monday that mirrors one for media employees that went viral earlier this month.
• Habersham said his goal was to give members of under-represented groups greater leverage when negotiating their salaries.
• He said he was inspired by a fellow ad industry employee and woman of color who told him she was recently promoted but only received a cost-of-living pay raise.
• Habersham also created an Instagram account to make the list more permanent and start a conversation.
• As of Wednesday afternoon, the list had more than 950 entries from agencies including McCann, Wieden and Kennedy, and Edelman, and the account had more than 950 followers.
• Entries ranged from an assistant account executive at Publicis New York making $40,000 to a chief strategy officer with a salary of $500,000.
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Spreadsheets, those office tools once used almost exclusively by accountants, are going viral.

After museum staffers, WeWork engineers, and reporters at media outlets across the country compared their salaries via multiple spreadsheets - including one created by Business Insider's Meghan Morris - it was perhaps inevitable that the ad industry got its own public Google doc.

Cole Habersham, an account director at IPG agency R/GA, created Real Agency Salaries over the weekend, using the same format as the media version that was covered earlier this month. His sheet also has an equivalent Google data entry form people can use.

More than 900 people have entered their salaries into the sheet in two days

Habersham published the document on Monday and colleague Corey Kindberg shared the link with his 14,000-plus Twitter followers.

By Wednesday, it had more than 950 entries ranging from an Asian female social media coordinator at the Los Angeles offices of Laundry Service who reported making $49,800 to a chief strategy officer at an unnamed client-side organization who listed a salary at $500,000.

The sheet allows people to compare pay across disciplines. For example, account directors, art directors, and strategy directors with similar levels of experience list widely varied salaries.

The accuracy of the data in the spreadsheet couldn't be confirmed.

Many participants omitted their employer; Habersham and another senior-level agency source said this is because the information could make it too easy to identify people.

Habersham's goal was to give women and people of color greater leverage in pay negotiations

Habersham said he was inspired by a fellow agency employee who told him she had recently been promoted but only got a cost-of-living raise.

He said the fact that she's a woman of color highlighted another pain point: Minority groups often enter salary negotiations without the knowledge or confidence of their mostly white, male, straight colleagues.

Habersham said with social discomfort around salary sharing and ad agencies' well-publicized lack of diversity, there hasn't been much well-informed conversation about pay expectations.

"I don't think it's a malicious attempt to intentionally pay women and people of color less," said Habersham, who is black. "But I do think our behavior can be to accept less versus a white male heterosexual colleague going in, asking for way more than initially offered, and negotiating."

Habersham said his father's first response to the sheet was to ask whether he was planning to unionize. He said he doesn't expect to true pay parity to be achieved, but that he hoped the sheet would give employees at all levels more power to ask for what they think they deserve.

He also created an Instagram account to highlight individual entries.

Habersham said people have been reaching out to tell him how badly the list was needed. It now includes agency staffers based in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Spain with salaries listed in pounds and euros.