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“If you are in advertising, you may be a racist,” was the somewhat bold title of a SXSW panel last week. While gender is the diversity issue hitting the headlines in Australia, race is a big part of the debate. In the US it’s a much more pointy issue.
The bottom line from the panel debate was that agencies need to create more diverse work environments that generate a wider breadth of ideas, which is proven to drive growth.
The panel was put together by Erin Swenson Gorrall, group planning director for MullenLowe US, following recent race related issues that have made headlines in the US, such as Ferguson, Baltimore and Donald Trump’s recent rhetoric.
She wanted to know if some of these problems can be combatted through advertising.
The panel comprised Cummins&Partners strategy and innovation officer, Arwa Mahdawi, president and creative director for Moses Inc, Louie Moses, director, producer and writer, Thomas Allen Harris and his business partner, Don Perry.
Mahdawi, who recently started satirical website Rent-A-Minority to combat the notion of faux diversity efforts, says a lot of the issues come back to hiring decisions.
“It’s been proven again and again, more people in the room create more creative ideas. There is a strong business case for [diversity]. Rather than having the Hispanic agency, or the African American agency, let’s just try and focus on making agencies more reflective of the country’s demographics,” she added.
Mahdawi highlighted the absurdity of the multicultural agency, saying: “If we’ve got multicultural agencies, what does that make the other agencies? The straight white man agency? And actually most of the time they are.”
Moses agreed adding that, brands want to sell product and they’ll be able to do that better if agencies and their messaging connects with a wider breadth of consumers, but relying on race to identify consumers is “lazy” storytelling.
“The stereotypes, the cliches and the puns, all those things that we use in advertising are a really lazy way to profile people and target people,” he says. He adds that data from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology found that regardless of culture, language or skin colour, the basic human emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, anger and surprise, are the same.
“After a 20-year study that this institute did it said that we’re all the same. From an agency standpoint we want to share that with a client, and connect with people on an emotional level,” Moses said.
“In general brands want to sell products or services, and if we can connect that with a customer or consumer they’re happy, because the colour they care about is green.”
Behind the news
This isn’t just an incendiary SXSW panel name, it’s a conversation that needs to be had, and not just in the US.
Another session in the same venue the previous day was so busy I was sitting on the floor, but for this session, while the turnout was solid, the room wasn’t full. I could hardly believe it.
It’s well known that many agencies and companies have a diversity issue - not just a gender issue - especially in the higher ranks. It was disheartening that so little attenion was being paid and more weren’t here to try to solve a problem that still leaves so many feeling like they don’t have a voice. It goes back to why it’s so hard to solve diversity issues; the majority of industry doesn’t think it has a problem to start with.
This was no regular panel, and the conversation was prefaced with “to be open and a real conversation about race in advertising”.
Part of the conversation was as an industry we are constantly searching for what makes consumers different, so they can be sold to. However if we look for similarities, we’ll be in a better place. This conversation is often not had because when it is, everyone is always looking for someone to blame, or watching what they say for fear of saying the wrong thing.
To break through we need to have a conversation without blame attached in order to drive real change.
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