16869: Moving Forward In All Directions.

 

This NAACP advertisement—which ran in 2021—declared: Advocacy Has One Direction, Forward.

 

Three years later, President-Elect Donald Trump returns to supremacy and shows how power can force moving backward.

16450: How Adland Celebrates Black Friday.

 

Today is Black Friday.

 

For Adland, there will be no acknowledgment of Black culture or Black Lives Matter. There will be zero recognition of the Blackfeet Nation, despite a Presidential Proclamation urging all citizens to celebrate November 24, 2023, as Native American Heritage Day.

 

Over 24 hours, Adland will ignore all things Black—as well as historical references for Black Friday—opting to embrace the popular belief that the day’s name derives from businesses staying in the black.

 

For sales and profit, Adland is operating at full tilt today—and extends the event well before and after the actual date. For diversity, equity, and inclusion, Adland is taking the day off—and the next 365 too.

16397: Progressive Failure, Dominating Victory.

 

The New York Times published a perspective titled, “The Failure of Progressive Movements,” focusing on the perceived shortcomings of Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. While the trio initially sparked passions, “none of the three movements have come close to achieving their ambitions.”

 

Adland certainly reflects the phenomena in semi-twisted ways.

 

Given the greed of White holding companies—with CEOs collecting multimillion-dollar salaries—the 1 percent are literally in charge.

 

#MeToo was more moment versus movement, where Diet Madison Avenue had a shorter shelf life than a can of Diet Coke. And gender pay gaps have expanded.

 

As for Black Lives Matter, even Human Heat Shields are among the diminished, dumped, and departed. And racial underrepresentation has extended.

 

Yet does not achieving their ambitions constitute failure or corroborate success—i.e., the overpowering success of White privilege and systemic racism?

 

The Failure of Progressive Movements

 

Prominent movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have had an impact. But none achieved their ambitions.

 

By David Leonhardt

 

Three progressive movements have risen to prominence over the past 15 years and vowed to create a fairer America: Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

 

All of them have had an impact. Occupy popularized the idea of the 1 percent and the 99 percent. #MeToo led to the firing (and sometimes jailing) of sexual predators, as well as the hiring of more women in prominent jobs. Black Lives Matter led to policing reforms in some cities and the hiring of more Black Americans in prominent jobs.

 

Still, none of the three movements have come close to achieving their ambitions.

 

Congress has not passed any major laws to reduce economic, gender or racial inequality, such as a wealth tax, universal pre-K or nationwide police reforms. Instead, taxes on the affluent are near their lowest level in decades, and the number of killings by the police remains largely unchanged. “The term ‘reckoning’ was invoked again and again, and yet we don’t seem to have reckoned with any of our problems in any meaningful way,” Fredrik deBoer, a popular Substack newsletter writer, argues in a new book.

 

What explains these disappointments? In part, it’s simply that political change is fantastically difficult and often takes decades. But the degree of difficulty is only part of the story.

 

The movements also bear some responsibility for their disappointments. Above all, they made decisions geared more toward changing elite segments of American society — like academia, Hollywood and the national media — than toward passing new laws and changing most people’s lives.

 

That’s the central argument of deBoer’s book, “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.” It has helped me think about American politics, and I want to devote today’s newsletter to these issues.

 

Radical and practical

 

The most successful political movements tend to share a few features. They start with activists whose goals can seem so audacious as to be unrealistic. (Otherwise, there would be no need for a movement.) Over time, the movement’s leaders make careful decisions about how to accomplish at least some of those goals. They appeal to public opinion. They collaborate with unlikely allies. They work the system to change the system.

 

It was true of the civil rights movement, which combined radical aims with patriotic symbols and nonviolent protest. More recently, the gay rights movement accomplished rapid change partly by emphasizing traditional values like marriage and military service. The lessons also apply to the political right: Abortion opponents spent decades patiently taking over the Republican Party and making the case that voters have a right to choose their own policies, state by state.

 

Recent progressive movements have tended to be less strategic, explains deBoer, a self-described leftist. Occupy celebrated its lack of structure, including its lack of concrete goals. “Demands are disempowering since they require someone else to respond,” one Occupy protester told The New York Times in 2011. Black Lives Matter refused to name leaders, contrasting its approach with the old top-down civil rights movement. #MeToo, befitting its hashtag, never quite became an organized movement.

 

None of the three created a mass organization with a long-term plan — as labor unions, civil rights groups, evangelical Christians and other successful movements did in past decades.

 

Occupy and Black Lives Matter also allowed unpopular positions to shape their public image — and weaken them. For instance, polling shows that most Black Americans support major changes to policing but not less policing. Much of Black Lives Matter, however, focused on cutting police funding. One organizer wrote a Times Opinion article titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”

 

The recent movements have instead had more success changing elite institutions that tend to be filled by fellow liberals. The winners of prestigious cultural awards have become more diverse. Media organizations now capitalize Black when describing somebody’s race. President Biden has made Juneteenth a federal holiday. Universities emphasize identity in their curriculums.

 

Symbols over substance

 

These are real changes, but deBoer notes that they have little effect on most people’s lives. They instead reflect what the political philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls the “elite capture” of social justice campaigns. “Today,” deBoer writes, “left-activist spaces are dominated by the college-educated, many of whom grew up in affluence and have never worked a day at a physically or emotionally demanding job.” For that reason, these spaces prioritize “the immaterial and symbolic” over “the material and the concrete,” deBoer argues.

 

(That point is related to a continuing theme of this newsletter: the class inversion of American politics.)

 

DeBoer’s writing can be withering, as the best polemics often are, and few people will agree with all of his arguments. But his central point is important, whether you’re part of the political left, center or right: Calling out injustice isn’t the same as fighting it.

 

“The spirit of 2020 was always a righteous spirit, and the people and organizations that powered that moment had legitimate grievances and moral demands,” he writes. “What we need is practicality, resilience and a plan.”

16346: Quotas & Affirmative Action For The Privileged…?

 

This ain’t a new rant, but it’s always worth repeating.

 

Harvard Business Review published a report titled, “How to Effectively—and Legally—Use Racial Data for DEI,” which included the following two paragraphs:

 

To understand how to best act on this complex topic, it’s important to start with the legal foundations. According to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it’s illegal to consider any single candidate’s or employee’s race—even with the intention of creating a more diverse, equitable, or inclusive workforce—in any employment decision. Employers can’t create de facto hiring quotas (e.g., “50% of the employees hired in this department must be women”), or “reserve seats” for employees from certain groups, even in the interest of diversity.

 

According to the law, even after the recent Supreme Court ruling, gender-conscious or race-conscious hiring practices are permitted, but only as part of limited, temporary, and highly structured voluntary affirmative action programs, undertaken only if employers find evidence of company-wide or industry-wide hiring discrimination, only to correct the initial imbalance, and only without “undue harm” on members of non-targeted groups (meaning that employers cannot lay off white workers to hire workers of color).

 

The paragraphs explain recent maneuvers in Adland—as well as underscore the systemic racism so prevalent in the field.

 

In 2016, Omnicom President-CEO-Pioneer of Diversity John Wren vowed to double the number of female creative leaders at BBDO within the calendar year. In 2018, Ogilvy publicly declared that 20 women would be hired into creative leadership roles by 2020. In short, White advertising agencies took advantage of legal loopholes to promote White women via voluntary affirmative action programs.

 

Yet despite generating heat shields and performative PR in response to George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, White ad agencies have not even suggested implementing quotas to increase Black representation. Affirmative action is deemed reverse discrimination. No one has openly pursued the processes proffered by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, executing cluster hires to correct the fully acknowledged imbalances.

 

In Adland, quotas and affirmative action are exclusively presented by the privileged—without question or hesitation—to the privileged. It’s systemic racism positioned as progress.

16205: Expanding Heat Shields & Hot Air.

 

AgencySpy posted on the latest heat shield maneuvers from The One Club and Allies in Recruitment (aka AIR). Hey, if adidas went after Black Lives Matter for logo-related copyright infringement, surely Nike must be considering legal action in this scenario.

 

The One Club and Allies in Recruiting Expand Equify Diversity Certification Program

 

By Kyle O’Brien

 

The One Club for Creativity and Allies in Recruiting (AIR) have expanded their Equify diversity training and certification program to help both senior executives and staff create more inclusive and equitable practices in their organizations.

 

Equify was developed for AIR in 2020 by James Kinney, global chief people officer at Media.Monks—who recently launched the Advertising Alliance for Mental Health—and an AIR founding partner and board advisor, to establish foundational best practices for inclusion education across organizations. AIR became part of The One Club in July 2022.

 

The audio program—with closed captioning available—goes into detail about diversity, equity and inclusion and how it affects work culture. Equify uses clear examples to cover topics across generations, cultural and gender identity, accessibility and ableism, sustainability and more to unite, mobilize and create changemakers within an organization, according to The One Club.

 

Equify is designed for everyone from senior executives, hiring managers, talent and HR teams, to any employee who participates in hiring or wants to create a more inclusive culture in their workplace. It is designed to bridge the knowledge gap between how organizations hire talent, and how diverse talent can be supported, included and retained.

 

The global program now includes two separate courses, each structured like a podcast. The new Equify 2.0 spans 11 chapters, addressing subjects including environmental, social and governance and DEI, how and why to collect diversity data, and mental health and diversity. The courses reflect Kinney’s engaging personality, taking an enjoyable, relatable approach to the subject matter.

 

“I’m in war mode, and in a war mood, in order to get DEI and culture back on track.” said Kinney in a statement. “We’ve made so much meaningful progress, but now is not the time to go to sleep on the mission. Our industry is shifting by the day, and Equify gives us a common language of belonging and a knowledge base to unify. This moment and the new era of creativity is about knowledge, facts and growth, not fear.”

 

The initial program has already been well received by the industry.

 

“In the last few years, we’ve seen so many impactful but disconnected DEI efforts in our industry,” said Dani Herrera, director, recruitment operations and DEI at R/GA in a statement. “I see Equify as a cornerstone and the foundation of DEI knowledge that pushes our industry to achieve sustainable, collective, and meaningful change.”

 

Mabel Liang, senior talent acquisition partner at Nike, added that Equify breaks the content down into short sessions with a theme and structure like a podcast, making it easy to listen to at someone’s own pace.

 

“True long-term change requires education for all members of an organization,” said Kevin Swanepoel, CEO, The One Club in a statement. “We’re proud to work with AIR on this expanded Equify program designed to build a shared foundation of diversity and inclusion knowledge, understanding, and best practices for both leaders and teams at agencies and brands.”

 

Equify is the latest in a line of DEI programs available from The One Club, including the annual Where Are All the Black People diversity conference and job fair, One School free portfolio program for Black creatives in the U.S. and U.K., and global creative boot camps.

16201: Black Lives Do Matter To Adidas…

 

In France, adidas and White advertising agency MNSTR created the Club Originals campaign, embracing club culture. Gee, who’s ripping off whom?

 

16193: Adidas ≠ All Day I Dream About Suing.

 

The New York Times reported adidas executed a crossover backpedaling stutter step move in its trademark dispute with Black Lives Matter. The German sportswear company had challenged a BLM trademark application, arguing that the organization’s proposed logo was “confusingly similar” to adidas’ three-stripe logo. Two days later, adidas said it would pull its opposition ASAP. In this case, three stripes and you’re out.

 

Adidas Drops Trademark Dispute With Black Lives Matter

 

The German sportswear company challenged the trademark application on Monday, saying it was “confusingly similar” to its three-stripe logo. Within 48 hours, it reversed course.

 

By Amanda Holpuch

 

Two days after Adidas objected to a trademark application by the advocacy group Black Lives Matter for a logo featuring three parallel stripes, the German sportswear company said that it would withdraw its opposition.

 

Adidas challenged the trademark application in a filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on Monday. On Wednesday, the company said in an emailed statement that it would withdraw its opposition “as soon as possible.”

 

In the filing on Monday, Adidas said that it opposed the Black Lives Matter application because it showed a trademark that “incorporates three stripes in a manner that is confusingly similar” to the company’s familiar three-stripe logo “in appearance and overall commercial impression.”

 

The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation filed the trademark application for a yellow three-stripe logo design in November 2020. The group is one of several organizations associated with the wider Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in 2013 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager.

 

The foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In its statement, Adidas did not say why it was reversing its opposition to the trademark application.

 

In September 2022, the window opened for individuals and groups to file their opposition to the foundation’s trademark application. Adidas repeatedly sought to extend the window before submitting its notice of opposition on Monday, according to the filing.

 

Adidas said that it had been using a three-stripe mark on footwear since at least 1952 and that the design had been used in its partnerships with professional athletes, including Lionel Messi, James Harden and Patrick Mahomes. The company said the three-stripe logo had also been used in its collaborations with and sponsorships of celebrities, including Beyoncé, Selena Gomez and Bad Bunny.

 

In the filing, the company said that the public understood that the three-stripe mark “distinguishes and identifies Adidas’s merchandise.”

 

This short-lived trademark battle comes after a failed attempt by Adidas to challenge the fashion designer Thom Browne, who the company said used stripes in his designs in a way that was too similar to the Adidas stripes. In January, a federal jury in Manhattan ruled against Adidas.

 

In 2020, when global Black Lives Matter protests took place after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, Adidas made several commitments to its Black employees. The company said at the time that 30 percent of new hires would be Black or Latino, and it pledged to invest in programs that benefited the Black community. Some employees said then that Adidas’s promises lacked an explicit acknowledgment of how the company had treated Black employees.

 

A year earlier, a New York Times investigation found that the relatively few Black employees at the company’s North American headquarters in Portland, Ore., often felt marginalized and sometimes discriminated against. The investigation found that in 2018 only 4.5 percent of the 1,700 employees at the company’s Portland campus identified as Black and that only about 1 percent of the more than 300 worldwide vice presidents were Black.

 

More recently, Adidas has been dealing with the aftermath of its messy split from Kanye West in October, after he made a series of antisemitic remarks and embraced white supremacist tropes. Adidas was criticized for not being quick enough to cut ties with Mr. West, who is now known as Ye.

 

The company said in a statement that Ye’s “recent comments and actions have been unacceptable, hateful and dangerous, and they violate the company’s values of diversity and inclusion, mutual respect and fairness.”

 

In March, Bjorn Gulden, who took over as chief executive of Adidas in January, declared that 2023 would be a “transition year” for the company. Adidas has been losing its market share to rivals, such as Nike, and in February it issued its fourth profit warning in six months, saying it expected big losses this year.

10669: Exclusivity Beats Eloquence, Racism Defeats Reason.

Adweek published a provocative perspective from M&C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment Brand Strategy SVP Sabrina Lynch that will probably go way over the heads of the average White adperson and/or Caucasian client. Seems like Lynch used roughly 1,250 big words to say that Blacks are not a monolithic audience.

 

There is undoubtedly a companion PowerPoint deck ready to clobber clients, confusing them to the point of coughing up crumbs for a multicultural marketing tactic.

 

It’s challenging to convince clients to create more nuanced and mindful multicultural marketing when there is clear and consistent data that shows Blacks are not just underrepresented in advertising—they are underserved as an audience too. Plus, Black advertising agencies are underutilized and underpaid.

 

The issues listed directly above can be summarized in four words: Adland loves systemic racism.

 

The Duality of Black Life Matters

 

Marketers need to move beyond trauma bonding and contend with how Blackness is portrayed and defined

 

By Sabrina Lynch

 

Black History Month is rife with triggers for a Black person.

 

This may not be a surprising revelation. Every activity or message that recognizes the history of the African diaspora that built America is meticulously workshopped to maintain a balance that celebrates Black achievements—including historical contributions—alongside allyship over the atrocities still impacting Black communities. However, the mark frequently missed by the industry is an accurate depiction of the intersectionality of Black identity.

 

The default approach to marketing Blackness is seemingly reliant on symbolic and material representation, where a Black person’s body becomes a vessel for another person’s interpretation of Black folklore, language and movement. The portrayal of Blackness at a skin-deep level dismisses the cultural identities audiences hold dear, and Black representation becomes far more one-dimensional. It starts to mean something more when multiple layers of identity are applied.

 

Spotlighting the sense of connectedness that local, global and national communities feel due to what they experience because of their skin color is sound but does not tell the story of the diversity of these experiences from people with an array of backgrounds. More often than not, creative campaigns designed for mass American audiences—with Black people at the core—are built on trauma bonding, depicting the distress that comes with one’s ethnicity.

 

Since 2020, most U.S. advertisers have made an effort to be more precise in using Black representation to promote a product’s or business’ relevance in their lives. Whether it is being a resource or an ally, these strategies have primarily been pointed commentary on the daily challenges of being Black, such as racial injustice tackled by Nike in “Dream Crazy,” disparities in maternal and paternal parenting stress poignantly addressed in P&G’s “The Talk” or reluctant capital investment in female entrepreneurism highlighted by Mastercard’s “Shop, Share and Support Black Women-Owned Businesses” campaign. But there is existence outside of the trauma endured. They are fragments in an immense tapestry of life. For Black Americans, who have inherited and endured centuries of systemic racism, driving attachment through empathy will only carry a brand so far. It should go without saying that showing wokeness has a shelf life.

 

Intersectional storytelling

 

There are layers to the Black experience that are rarely portrayed, all of which are missed opportunities to recognize a larger community at hand. Notably absent are the nuanced and personal differences in cultural identity. Case in point: There are Americans who identify as African American, and there are first-generation Americans who refer to themselves as Black to recognize their lineage, whether Ghanaian, Guyanese or Grenadian. You also have those who sit at the intersection of country, race and nationality—born of the African diaspora, raised in a predominantly white country, now living in America.

 

Instead, tropes are created and perpetuated in advertising campaigns. All to answer one question asked with naive candor: “What kind of Black do we want to portray?” Maybe it’s the Metropolis Maven—a witty city dweller unmatched in ambition—or the Protective Parent, seething over the ban of AP African American Studies. Let’s not forget the Style Setter, who lives to bust jokes with friends on the block, or the Activist still reeling from the death of Tyre Nichols. Of course, there’s the Musichead, fluent in hip-hop slang.

 

While there’s nothing wrong with these particular personalities, they’re still a microscopic interpretation of the polylithic experience of being Black in America. It would be irresponsible to continue depicting the Black experience in such a narrow-minded way: There’s no exploration of duality, of embracing the joy and the pain of just being Black. A person of color can be the epitome of style, laugh with friends, have a visceral reaction to another racial atrocity and nod their head to the lyrics of “Mother I Sober” by Kendrick Lamar during a moment of quiet reflection. All on the same day. Sometimes the same hour. We must acknowledge the hybridity of lives led across the country far more than we currently do.

 

Advertising has a responsibility of care in Black storytelling, not only in positive representation but in building esteem, tempering social isolation and breaking the cycle of destructive patterns that portray Black as always synonymous with trauma and Afro-Americentrism—an approach that has historically hurt Black families and communities. Even when the flip side of trauma is given space to be conveyed in a campaign, it’s usually a lighthearted nod to cultural colloquialism, movement, music or fashion to provide an “insider” point-of-view of Black joy.

 

Now, arguably both approaches have the best intentions, but they are in danger of permitting the creation of outsider perspectives of very real human experiences. This also applies to Black creatives who may well be behind the design of an advertising campaign. Perspective can make or break resonance, drawing a gray line between cultural observation and preserving a stereotype of Black experience through expected social conventions. Just look to TikTok creator DameDamian, who has faced backlash over this approach.

 

That said, none of this critique means that the industry should hold back on how they evolve the way they represent people of color. The point is to do it better by understanding the different values and customs held by this audience. In a survey by the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, 60% of consumers from diverse communities shared they felt “invisible or underrepresented” in ads, increasing from 58% in 2021. And with 46.8 million people in the U.S. identifying as Black, keeping up with how they self-identify is crucial—for example, while Black and African American may be used interchangeably, they are inherently different.

 

It begins with understanding how your advertising strategies have defined Blackness over the past three years. Merriam-Webster offers two interpretations:

 

a: the fact or state of belonging to a population group that has dark pigmentation of the skin : the fact or state of being Black

 

b: the social and cultural identity and experience of Black people : representations or expressions of this (as in art or literature)

 

So far, the go-to approach has been the former over the latter. Campaigns need to be more demonstrative of the microcosms of Black lives instead of being a singular, generic viewpoint based on age or U.S. geography. This is where thorough audience mapping will be your best friend, pinpointing the behavioral nuances that will inform scripts, casting and messaging. Going more in-depth with this exercise will give your creative the best possible chance to hit home for the intended target. When have we seen an acute observation of the differences between Caribbean American and American Caribbean households in the U.S., or the different bonds Afro-Latinos and Black Hispanics may have with their biracial families in navigating the duality of their cultural makeup? Touching upon the interrelation of ethnicity is not seen as a strategic imperative, unless the advertising is aimed directly at diasporic countries. But the diaspora is already here and well-established.

 

Let’s not forget the deal-breaker: defining the quality of Blackness’ role in storytelling. There runs the high risk that the narrative comes across as a representation exercise, where non-Black audiences walk away with a simplistic idea about the constitution of Black life. This is what leads to skepticism, an intuitive reflex in Black communities who could misinterpret your creative as an appropriation of struggle or joy for voyeurism. Nuanced identity is the future, and the future is now.

10648: BHM 2023—W+K & BLM.

Adweek spotlighted a film commemorating the 10th anniversary of Black Lives Matter created by a Black affinity group from Wieden + Kennedy. The story also mentioned projects hatched by other ERGs at the White advertising agency.

 

Hey, April will mark the 14th anniversary of the late Dan Wieden acknowledging Adland is “fucked up” in regards to diversity. Don’t expect a film on that milestone moment.

 

As Black Lives Matter Turns 10, Wieden+Kennedy’s We+Black Reflects On a Decade of Change

 

The agency debuts an emotional film in observance of special anniversary

 

By Sara Century

 

July will mark the 10th anniversary of the widespread use of the phrase “Black lives matter.” Initially spoken by Alicia Garza, who, alongside Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi, founded the movement of the same name, these words have inspired millions worldwide and continue to fuel the most important protests of our time.

 

Looking back over a decade of impact, Wieden+Kennedy Portland’s Black affinity group, We+Black, has created a film tribute to this historic anniversary titled We Still Matter. Featuring clips of interviews with W+K employees, the nearly 3-minute short begins with the emotional response they experienced in light of the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense in the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

 

Audio clips of news broadcasts announcing the results of the trial are met with sounds of growing resistance and the chant of “Black lives matter” as these W+K employees gaze head-on into the camera. Set to the tune of original music from W+K employee Nukbeatz (David Henry Jr.), participants share personal reactions to cases of police brutality, including the killings of Mike Brown and George Floyd, as well as the incredible acts of protest that occurred as a result.

 

Three words that changed the world

 

“The protests that are happening, not just in the U.S. but seeing that it went global, was honestly just the most beautiful thing to see,” one narrator says. “There are Black 10-year-olds in America who have existed in a world where they’ve constantly just been told that they matter. That’s amazing,” another narrator continues.

 

This is a continuation of W+K’s employee-helmed films created without clients, including “The Myth,” which combated anti-Asian hate by rejecting the expectations of being a “model minority.” Meanwhile, WKNY’s Black ERG, Noir, delved into the complex feelings the BIPOC community has toward Juneteenth in “Juneteenth Thoughts.” This follows an art show in Portland, also titled “We Still Matter,” a week before the video’s release.

 

In addition to “We Still Matter,” We+Black is working in partnership with Portland’s public transportation system on an OOH campaign that will last beyond Black History Month through the rest of the year, highlighting local Black-owned businesses.

15676: COVID–19 | Racial Injustice–0.

 

Advertising Age has a section titled, “How Brands And Agencies Are Dealing With COVID Resurgence—A Regularly Updated List.”

 

It’s a safe bet that the feature will be regularly updated and run waaaaay longer than “A Regularly Updated Blog Tracking Brands’ Responses To Racial Injustice.”