6916: Picture Imperfect.

Developing news in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• Ritz Camera warned of possible liquidation, saying it does not have enough cash to survive the summer. You mean those commercials with honcho David Ritz and Carmen Electra didn’t ignite sales?

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that over 26 percent of Americans are obese. Somewhere, Ronald McDonald is proclaiming, “Mission Accomplished.”

• J.C. Penney same-store sales for June fell 8.2 percent. Target same-store sales for June fell 6.2 percent. Free sales-inducing ideas: Stock more plus-sized garments and execute promotional tie-ins with Mickey D’s.

• Turns out former D.C. Mayor Marion Barry was busted for stalking his girlfriend, shortly after the two had a spat. Hey, if Barry joined Twitter, would women be upset to learn he was following them?

6915: Hasta La Vista, Univisión…?

From The Miami Herald…

Univisión struggles to overcome recession

By Meg James
Los Angeles Times Service

LOS ANGELES—When Spanish-language broadcasting giant Univisión Communications was sold for $13.7 billion three years ago, the highly leveraged deal was, in the words of one veteran banker, “priced for perfection.”

Given the $10 billion in debt the buyers were assuming, the slightest hiccup in the company’s financial performance would have a cascading negative effect.

The buyers, a consortium of investors including entertainment mogul Haim Saban, were counting on several factors to justify the steep purchase price: the nation’s exploding Hispanic population and the popularity of Spanish-language programming, coupled with the promise of robust advertising growth. They expected to hold the assets for a few years, then sell at a tidy profit.

But it’s not a perfect world.

In the two years since the buyout, the U.S. economy has collapsed, dragging down advertising to media companies. Adding to the economic distress, Univisión has been mired in a costly legal battle with its primary programming partner.

The big payday for Univisión’s owners, which include well-heeled private equity companies, seems far less certain. Instead of riding a high wave to easy profits, Univisión executives have been working furiously to dig the company out of its hole.

WROTE DOWN ASSETS
During the past year, the broadcaster has written down assets by $5.3 billion, and some industry insiders now believe the nation’s largest Spanish-language media company is worth closer to $9 billion—slightly less than what it owes.

In recent months, Univisión has been putting out fires on multiple fronts to shore up its finances and to protect its programming pipeline.

In January, it settled a nagging lawsuit brought by its longtime programming partner, Grupo Televisa of Mexico, which had threatened to strip Univisión of its most popular and profitable shows. The resolution guaranteed Univisión the right to broadcast Televisa’s hugely popular soap operas, including Cuidado con el Angel (Be Careful With the Angel), through 2017.

Two weeks ago, Univisión bought breathing room by refinancing $500 million in debt, pushing back the due date by three years to 2014. The extension means that Univisión no longer has to worry about burning through its cash within the next two years.

CABLE FEES
And during the past few months, Univisión achieved one of its highest priorities—getting cable and satellite TV operators to pay the company to carry its programming. The agreements with Time Warner Cable, DirecTV, AT&T and others should bring Univisión $175 million in 2009, and as much as $350 million annually by 2014.

The cable-subscriber fees help Univisión diversify its revenue and, for now, make up for the decline in ad revenue.

Univisión’s chief financial officer, Andrew Hobson, said the company’s actions during the past six months had put it on a stronger footing and should allow it to weather other economic storms.

“Our balance sheet is now bulletproof for even the most draconian scenarios,” Hobson said. “We don’t feel that we have covenant risks or liquidity risks for at least another five years.”

Still, credit-rating agencies worry that Univisión could default on loans that total $9.7 billion.

“This clears the runway a little bit for them, but we still have concerns about their liquidity and their ability to make their debt-amortization payments,” said Standard & Poor’s credit analyst Michael Altberg, who acknowledged that Univisión had bolstered its position.

“Before their credit amendment, they didn’t have that much of a cushion.”

Barclays Capital debt analyst Andrew Finkelstein said Univisión executives did “exactly what they needed to do for now.”

INCREASING REVENUES
But Univisión’s challenge in the next few years, he said, will be to increase revenue—a difficult task during an economic recession.

Univisión’s predicament is not unusual for a company sold in a leveraged buyout at the top of the market.

In 2006, Univisión’s then-controlling shareholder, billionaire A. Jerrold Perenchio, orchestrated a bidding war for the company.

The Spanish-language broadcaster had been showing dramatic growth, along with the Hispanic population. Univisión’s upside seemed unlimited.

6914: Room For Change.

From The New York Times. Hey, maybe Madison Avenue executives should be forced to room—or at least share cubicles—with minorities.

Interracial Roommates Can Reduce Prejudice

By Tamar Lewin

As a freshman at Ohio State University, and the only black student on his floor, Sam Boakye was determined to get good grades — in part to make sure his white roommate had no basis for negative racial views.

“If you’re surrounded by whites, you have something to prove,” said Mr. Boakye, now a rising senior who was born in Ghana. “You’re pushed to do better, to challenge the stereotype that black people are not that smart.”

Several recent studies, at Ohio State and elsewhere, have found that having a roommate of a different race can reduce prejudice, diversify friendships and even boost black students’ academic performance. But, the research found, such relationships are more stressful and more likely to break up than same-race pairings.

As universities have grown more diverse, and interracial roommate assignments are more common, social scientists have looked to them as natural field experiments that can provide insights on race relations.

“From a scientific standpoint, when these roommates are paired, you have a natural experiment going on, in an area that’s very difficult to test empirically,” said Thomas E. Trail, a graduate student in psychology at Princeton University who has studied interracial roommates. “You couldn’t very well set up an experiment assigning people to spend several months living with someone of a different race.”

Russell H. Fazio, an Ohio State psychology professor who has studied interracial roommates there and at Indiana University, discovered an intriguing academic effect. In a study analyzing data on thousands of Ohio State freshmen who lived in dorms, he found that black freshmen who came to college with high standardized test scores earned better grades if they had a white roommate — even if the roommate’s test scores were low. The roommate’s race had no effect on the grades of white students or low-scoring black students. Perhaps, the study speculated, having a white roommate helps academically prepared black students adjust to a predominantly white university.

That same study found that randomly assigned interracial roommates at Ohio State broke up before the end of the quarter about twice as often as same-race roommates.

Because interracial roommate relationships are often problematic, Dr. Fazio said, many students would like to move out, but university housing policies may make it hard to leave.

“At Indiana University, where housing was not so tight, more interracial roommates split up,” he said. “Here at Ohio State, where there was a housing crunch, they were told to work it out. The most interesting thing we found was that if the relationship managed to continue for just 10 weeks, we could see an improvement in racial attitudes.”

Read the full story here.

6913: Game Over.

This ad is a fusion of lousy copywriting and bad art direction.

6912: Slice Of Life.

Safe to say the Creative Minds comprising this survey were not exclusively advertising people. Otherwise, the yes slice would be considerably thinner.

6911: ¡Ay Carcrashamba!

This ad is about as subtle as a head-on collision.

6910: Mookie Today.

The New York Daily News commemorates the 20th anniversary of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing with a series of photos showing the stars then and now.

6909: The Minority Money Game.

From USA TODAY…

For many minorities, saving isn’t so easy

By Sandra Block and Laura Petrecca, USA TODAY

Many Americans fear they’ll outlive their savings, but African Americans and Hispanics face an even greater risk of spending the end of their lives in poverty.

Members of those two groups are less likely than white and Asian workers to participate in their employers’ 401(k) plans, and when they do contribute, they save less, according to a study scheduled for release today by Ariel Education Initiative and Hewitt Associates.

African Americans and Hispanics also are much more likely to take money out of their 401(k) plans for emergencies, which could further stunt long-term savings growth. And they are less likely to invest in stocks in favor of low-risk investments and real estate, increasing the risk that their savings won’t keep pace with inflation, retirement specialists say.

The survey, which analyzed data from nearly 3 million employees at the end of 2007, found significant differences in retirement savings even among higher-income employees. White workers who made $120,000 or more had an average balance of $223,408 in their 401(k) plans, vs. $154,902 for African Americans in the same salary range.

Monica Flamand, 33, a fraud analyst in Chicago who is Hispanic, has a 401(k) plan through her job but has saved only about $6,000 in five years. Her husband doesn’t have a 401(k) plan, she says. She worries that Social Security won’t be there for her when she retires.

“We don’t save,” she says. “We should. We could, if we really wanted to, save at least 3% of our paycheck, which is probably what we should talk about doing.”

Last year’s bear market wiped out 27% of the typical worker’s 401(k) plan, according to Fidelity Investments, forcing millions of Americans to save more, delay retirement or both. Many Americans have increased their savings rate in recent months, even as many employers have reduced or eliminated matches to 401(k) plans. But the Ariel/Hewitt study indicates that African Americans and Hispanics will have to save at a significantly faster pace than others to have a chance at a comfortable retirement.

Read the full story here.

6908: Comfort Inn’s Uncomfortable Gestures.

What’s with all the staged hand gestures?

6907: Legally And Morally Bankrupt.

Hating Mondays with a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• General Motors was granted permission by a federal bankruptcy judge to sell the bulk of its assets to a new entity. Somebody better ask for a CARFAX® report.

• Rep. Peter King of New York declared the late Michael Jackson was a “pervert” and wondered why Americans are “glorifying” a “low-life” while ignoring real heroes like firefighters, cops and teachers. Ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer will probably step in to tell King to tone it down already.

• Colin Powell criticized his fellow Republicans for their attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Powell believes Sotomayor should not be condemned for ruling against White firefighters in a reverse discrimination case. He added, “What we can’t continue to have is to have somebody like a Judge Sotomayor … called a racist.” Rush Limbaugh will likely respond by calling Powell a racist.

6906: MBA In Bullshit.

Build your brand online —with a Master’s Degree in Internet Marketing. The hype states, “The Internet Marketing Master’s Degree provides an in-depth exploration of Internet-specific marketing methodologies, Internet law, and interactive advertising design principles, as well as teaching the best ways to utilize social media networks and search engine optimization. Through it all, you’ll gain the necessary tools to create a viable marketing and strategic plan for selling products, developing and cultivating a brand, and for protecting a company’s reputation within the Internet community.”

Um, why is a college offering a Master’s Degree promising expertise in areas that the entire industry has not yet figured out?

6905: Multibingual.

Has anyone actually used Bing™ for anything?

The brand’s commercials are completely unintelligible. One would be hard-pressed to explain what the fuck Bing™ even is after viewing the spots. Ironically, the best way to find answers about Bing™ requires a Google™ search.

The recent PR surrounding Bing™ seems to confirm the problem. It’s as if the stories are forced on the media to generate fake hype. And tying to Twitter smacks of desperation.

Bing™ needs to do a search—for a new advertising agency. Of course, if Bing™ executives tried Bing™ to conduct the quest, they’d probably wind up with a bad decision like, say, Draftfcb.

Then Draftfcb would employ its cutting-edge—albeit culturally clueless—consumer insight expertise to appeal to diverse audiences. And the end result might include copy and imagery such as this:

6904: Bad Role-Playing & Bad Role Models.

Antisocial media and behavior in a MultiCultClassics Monologue…

• CNET News reported that social media entities like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are raking in serious loot with Mafia-inspired games. Seems folks just can’t get enough mobster role-playing, carrying out crimes including stealing and killing rivals. It’s amazing that Draftfcb has not emerged as a major player in the action.

• Former Washington Mayor Marion Barry was arrested and charged with stalking a woman. If only this guy would confine his criminal activities to online role-playing.

6903: Closing Notes On The Fourth Of July.

Perhaps society has grown so accustomed to things like Twitter and TMZ—with the instant delivery of news and short bursts of mindless content—that we fail to appreciate and savor the true historic moments.

On July 4, 2009, Serena and Venus Williams staged another groundbreaking event by dueling at Centre Court, with the younger sister picking up her third Wimbledon title.

And as Harry Webber pointed out, advertisers and media failed to recognize “the importance of celebrating the first Fourth of July since the birth of our nation—the very first—when we could tell our children, ‘Yes. You can grow up to be President.’ And know it to be true, deep down in your heart.”

6902: How Harlem Celebrates Independence Day.

From The New York Times…

Harlem Journal
The Good Old Red, White and Barbecue

By Christine Haughney

Limited space has long forced New Yorkers to celebrate Fourth of July rituals differently. As the rest of the country has backyard barbecues and pool parties, city dwellers cook lunches in tiny kitchens and carry them up to rooftops, or, if they can get a spot, they spread blankets in the parks.

In Harlem, Dorothy Davis celebrates with a front-stoop cookout.

Ms. Davis, 54, a full-time baby sitter with an encyclopedic knowledge of the comings and goings of her West 119th Street block, starts shopping weeks ahead for a communal feast. In a decade of yearly cookouts on the sidewalk in front of her building, Ms. Davis — known to neighbors as Dot or Auntie — has come to feed at least 50 relatives and neighbors.

“I don’t mind sharing my blessings,” she said, sitting in her living room near a tall stack of take-home containers. “I’m a people person.”

Part of the reason her cookout is so popular is her reputation for generous portions. Anthony Burrell, an Alvin Ailey dancer whose 3-year-old daughter, Sifare, is under Ms. Davis’s care, described the dinners she cooks for him on Friday nights.

“You could feed the whole block off one plate,” he said, recalling fried white fish, rice, collard greens and macaroni and cheese.

For her family, Ms. Davis’s efforts have made the Fourth of July into one of the biggest holidays her family celebrates, but the observance has taken on added significance since her Aunt Lillian, who loved the holiday, died two years ago.

This year, about 30 relatives drove in from Texas, Virginia, Rhode Island and South Carolina. Weeks in advance, Ms. Davis invited her building superintendent, a neighboring landlord and retired police officers from the local precinct.

“The neighbors come; she doesn’t have to invite them,” said one of her aunts, Lena Perryman, who stops by the cookout each year, even though she dislikes crowds. “She doesn’t turn anybody away.”

Ms. Davis, who says she has been cooking since she was 10, usually prepares collard greens, green beans, barbecue chicken, potato and macaroni salads. (She did not have time to bake this year, but she hinted that there might be a Costco cake for an uncle whose birthday is coming up.)

In an effort to cut costs, she is serving lemonade instead of cans of soda — though at some point, Ms. Davis may retreat to her apartment for her favorite Cognac.

The way Ms. Davis sees it, food is not just a source of sustenance. When guests are well fed, she said, there is “no fussing.”

“Usually at a cookout, there’s somebody who wants to fight,” she said. “We never had no arguments.”

In the weeks leading up to the cookout, Ms. Davis tries to squeeze in shopping around baby-sitting for eight children. Last weekend, she headed to two Western Beef stores in the Bronx to buy $400 of ribs, chicken and hamburgers, which she stored in a deep freezer in a bedroom. By Monday, she had already decided to set up the grill in a vacant lot next to her building. She was still sorting out what kind of pork to use in the collard greens.

On Thursday, she headed back to Western Beef to pick up hamburgers. As she shucked corn and soaked chicken, her sister Deborah picked up plates, and her daughter, Dequasha, headed to a party shop to make a deposit for 30 balloons.

By Friday, her entire family had started to pitch in with last-minute shopping and preparations. A goddaughter, Denise, was expected to arrive from Providence, R.I., to make the fruit salad. Aunts, brothers, daughters and nieces helped with peeling potatoes, spicing chicken and preparing ribs.

Her friend Tina is bringing a macaroni salad. One aunt who does not like to cook will bring a tossed salad. Setup is to begin as early as 6:30 on Saturday.

By late afternoon, her brother Marshall will start to grill. She will seat her relatives and neighbors on a half-dozen tables set up on the sidewalk. As the aroma of grilled chicken and ribs wafts down 119th Street, neighbors will start to appear.

In the end, she makes sure that no leftovers come home with her. One year she cooked so much, she had to hand out trays of food to relatives, neighbors — even strangers — to get rid of it all. While she estimates the cookout will cost $600, she does not keep track. Her concern is that people leave well fed.

“I spend, and I cry the next day when I’m broke,” she jokes. “It’s always better to have enough than not enough.”

6901: How Slaves “Celebrated” Independence Day.

From The Chicago Sun-Times…

Slaves denied even the chance to celebrate Fourth of July

By Anne Pastore

In America today, both black and white citizens gather to celebrate the Fourth of July, but that has not always been the case. Blacks in the antebellum North were sometimes pressured to stay away from celebrations, while in the South no one thought to include them. In his book Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic, Len Travers reports that in the overwhelmingly black South “no one was about to allow crowds of blacks to march anywhere.”

In the plantation country surrounding Charleston, S.C., in 1800, for example, the African-American population was 84 percent. As a minority, the whites never allowed slaves to celebrate the Fourth of July, Travers says, and they themselves “celebrated, as it were, while glancing over their shoulders. White Charlestonians could never quite dispel their fears of what their enslaved servants might do while their masters celebrated liberty.”

They had reason to be wary. Charleston suffered a devastating bout of fires, often at the homes of slaveholders, not a few of which occurred while the owners were out observing the Fourth. As fears spread, laws were passed forbidding gatherings of more than seven blacks. The use of fireworks, cigars and anything capable of starting a fire was outlawed.

Edward Hooker, a white visitor to South Carolina, found the Fourth of July experience unsettling: “The tables were served by negro slaves under the superintendence of the managers. What an incongruity! An Independence dinner for freedmen and slaves to wait on them. I couldn’t keep the thought out my mind, the whole time I was there feasting.” This “incongruity,” however, was not apparent to the party-goers, or to most white southerners.

As Travers writes, “Independence Day was for Americans only, and as far as white Charlestonians were concerned, blacks simply did not qualify.”

In northern cities, blacks were allowed to gather on the Fourth, Travers says, but when a hostile group of black youths took to the streets of Philadelphia on that day in 1804, whites retaliated the next year by forcing them out of the town square.

In his book Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720-1840, Gary B. Nash says that in the years following this incident the exclusion of blacks from Independence Day celebrations became customary. “Black citizens could enter the public space in front of Independence Hall only at their peril.”

As a result of their exclusion from Independence Day celebrations, African Americans in the North began to create their own holidays. In The Roots of African-American Identity: Memory and History in Antebellum Free Communities, Elizabeth Rauh Bethel says one of the first opportunities for a celebration came on Jan. 1, 1808, when the United States formally abolished the slave trade. This was also the day in 1804 when Toussaint L’Ouverture declared Haitian Independence, a date that would be commemorated by American blacks well into the 1820s.

On March 5, 1858—one year to the day after the Dred Scott decision—Boston’s African-American community began the Commemorative Festival, which marked the anniversary of the death of Crispus Attucks in the Boston Massacre as well as the Supreme Court ruling.

In the years before the Civil War, African Americans’ attitudes toward Independence Day were perhaps best expressed by Frederick Douglass in his 1852 speech named after its most famous line, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Douglass asked the crowd why they had invited him, a black man, to speak on this occasion celebrating freedom in a country where his people were not free.

“Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us,” he said. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Anne Pastore is a writer for History News Network.

6900: Nielsen Rerun.

Nielsen is getting lots of play out of a single lame layout. Insert minorities here.

6899: Freemasonry At Last!

From The New York Times…

Black Member Tests Message of Masons in Georgia Lodges

By Shaila Dewan and Robbie Brown

ATLANTA — The members of the Gate City Lodge No. 2 would like it known that Freemasonry, a centuries-old fraternal organization founded on the principles of the Enlightenment, is not racist.

But some of their fellow Masons here in Georgia are spoiling the message.

In June, the Worshipful Master, or leader, of the Gate City Lodge was served with complaints from two other lodges, whose Worshipful Masters were upset that Gate City had admitted a “nonwhite man” to its ranks.

Although the rules of Freemasonry do not say that members must be white, and there are numerous Hispanics, Asians and other ethnicities represented in lodges across the state, the Grand Master of Georgia decreed that the complaints would be heard in a Masonic trial that could have resulted in expulsion of a lodge or members of it. In response, Gate City (the name is an old nickname for Atlanta) filed a lawsuit in state court seeking an injunction to prevent its charter from being revoked.

The “nonwhite man” whose presence had caused such a fuss is Victor Marshall, a shy, 26-year-old African-American Army reservist who has been eagerly studying the secret catechisms of the Masons for almost a year. Mr. Marshall, who has the Army rank of specialist, said he was attracted to the Masons because of the group’s spirit of volunteerism.

“I’ve been interested in the Freemasons for a very long time,” he said in an interview. “It took me a while to find my place and get up the courage to try and join.”

Mr. Marshall investigated historically black Masonic lodges, which are part of an entirely separate organization known as Prince Hall Masonry, but said he felt most at home at the Gate City Lodge, a predominantly white Masonic group where officers attend in tuxedos and regular members wear suits and ties. Recent Gate City programs have included talks by Hindu priests, a Mozart recital (the composer was a Mason) and a visit from an Auschwitz survivor.

After petitioning to join, Mr. Marshall moved up through the ranks, becoming a Master Mason, giving him the right to visit other lodges.

Mr. Marshall was actually the second black member of Gate City, said David Llewellyn, a member and lawyer who is representing the lodge. But he was the first to attract notice, when he and Masons from across the state attended the 275th anniversary of a lodge in Savannah.

“There were ill-informed brethren who were surprised that there was an African-American brother,” Mr. Llewellyn said, “and some of them were very upset.”

Read the full story here.

6898: Horny On The Fourth Of July.

Celebrate Independence Day with a new dependent, sugar daddies.

6897: Classic Bullshit From Coke…?

An anonymous comment left at the post on Coca-Cola Assistant VP of African-American Marketing Yolanda White inspired this follow-up perspective. The comment included declaring, “Ms. White is Black and even she is culturally clueless.”

It’s not fair to presume Ms. White is culturally clueless, and it’s quite probable that she isn’t. MultiCultClassics’ original remarks were never intended to question Ms. White’s cultural credentials.

At the same time, Ms. White did make a lot of bizarre statements. She said, “Three years ago, we began to see new evidence of growing population, growing buying and growing power in income. We also saw significant [interest] in emerging categories, which made this consumer segment that much more viable for us as a company. So we really began to rebuild our strategic focus and realign our organizational capabilities to go after this consumer more holistically.”

For how many fucking decades must research be presented to prove the Black consumer market has money and is a viable audience? Surely Ms. White isn’t implying the segment mysteriously vanished for a few years, suddenly becoming poor and unworthy of Coke’s interest.

Additionally, every “insight” Ms. White presented on Black consumers was originally delivered to Coke by advertising agencies like Burrell and FUSE—as long ago as the 1970s.

The revelation that “a plethora of other agencies” handles Black-targeted assignments is particularly disturbing.

First, it continues the corporate crimes of allowing White agencies to win minority billings while non-White agencies are never permitted to even pitch for mass market spoils.

Second, it contributes to the perpetuation of exclusivity and discrimination in the industry. The White agencies admit they are doing a lousy job of embracing diversity. As previously mentioned, the head of Coke’s lead agency—Dan Wieden of Wieden + Kennedy—proclaimed things are “fucked up.” The Coca-Cola Company officially brags about its commitment to supplier diversity. Yet it awards work to agencies that appear adverse to diversity, while its minority shops must beg for scraps. This deliberate bullshit is driving minority shops out of business, further compounding the global problem.

MultiCultClassics hopes Ms. White’s answers were rooted in supporting and promoting the Black consumer market—as well as representing her bosses. Again, it’s not fair to call the woman culturally clueless. But if Ms. White really believes her own words, one has to wonder if she’s just plain clueless.