16600: Multicultural Multiple Choices.

Advertising Age published a lengthy report spotlighting debates about the best label for non-White advertising and marketing. The top choices include:

 

Multicultural Marketing

 

Cultural Marketing

 

Inclusive Marketing

 

Cross-Cultural Marketing

 

Total Market Marketing

 

Transcultural Marketing

 

And chip in MultiCultClassics’ original entry:

 

Multicrumbtual Marketing

 

A better way to change the conversation might involve redefining General Market Advertising. The choices here include:

 

White Advertising

 

Exclusive Expositions

 

Caucasian Communications

 

Systemic Racism

 

And chip in MultiCultClassics’ original entry:

 

Monocultural Marketing

 

Inside The Multicultural Marketing Debate—How The Ad World Is Clashing Over Culture

 

Ad Age spoke with 12 advertising execs about the state of multicultural marketing, how it’s evolving and its ongoing challenges

 

By Brian Bonilla

 

Gilbert Dávila remembers when the term multicultural marketing was coined about 20 years ago during an ANA meeting.

 

At the time, multicultural marketing represented an advance from minority marketing or ethnic marketing, as it was then called, because it embraced not just one, but many groups. Multicultural marketing, which got its name during a group conversation involving Dávila, “became an umbrella that not only housed Hispanic, African American and Asian, but for the first time, it included LGBTQ and even people with disabilities,” said the co-founder of the ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing and CEO of DMI Consulting.

 

But now, there is a debate over whether the term should be retired and if the word culture is being appropriated.

 

While no one disputes the value of reaching under-represented groups—$45.8 billion is expected to be spent on U.S. multicultural advertising this year (which is still less than 6% of total spending), according to research firm PQ Media—there is a growing clash over the role of “cultural” versus “multicultural” marketing, and discussion over whether the latter term is limited or dated.

 

Some believe that the word multicultural, which was adopted to communicate inclusion, can actually be exclusionary—resulting in multicultural marketing being siloed, or as Dávila put it, “disassociated from the rest of the marketing team.”

 

Multicultural as a word comes with “baggage that creates a challenge,” IW Group President and CEO Nita Song said. “The strength of multicultural is that it is probably the most recognized word, it is the one common word that we’ve all grown up with and clients understand it. But I don’t think it’s been supported in the best way in terms of the opportunities that are presented today.”

 

Emerging terms

 

At issue is whether the term multicultural, the widely accepted way of describing marketing catered toward diverse audiences including race, gender and sexual orientation, is too synonymous with racial or ethnic marketing. This has given birth to new terms meant to act as an evolution from the word. Agencies such as Sensis, BeautifulBeast and Lerma/, for example, call themselves cross-cultural shops.

 

BeautifulBeast’s website explains it this way: “While our DNA is Hispanic, we are a cross-cultural agency.”

 

“Cross-cultural is a broader term,” said Pedro Lerma, principal and founder of Texas-based agency Lerma/. “We believe that we can credibly address and lead with underrepresented segments of the market, so it’s not just about being inclusive within the agency, but it’s about having a real respect and being willing to lead with a perspective that is other than your own.”

 

Rob Velez, VP of inclusive network sales at music-video platform Vevo, said he saw the need for a move away from multicultural toward “inclusive marketing” around 2020.

 

“I grew up in this industry and it was always … you have your general market and then you have multicultural,” Velez said. “[Multicultural] was always the afterthought … I’ve just always seen multicultural as this separate thing that wasn’t really thought of from inception.”

 

If the term inclusive becomes adopted broadly, Velez hopes it makes marketing to diverse audiences a larger part of brands’ efforts. Since Vevo’s Inclusive practice launched six years ago, previously under the term of multicultural marketing, it has grown by double digits each year, Velez said.

 

But there are still some marketers that “hesitate to speak to a new audience that they haven’t spoken to before and coming off as inauthentic and possibly upsetting them to the point where that segment of the population will reject that brand,” Velez said. 

 

Beatriz Rojas, the head of brand advertising at healthcare company Kaiser Permanente, said she and the company adopted the phrase inclusive marketing six years ago. She said the phrase is broader and fits better with the company’s mission to provide healthcare to all types of people.

 

“We want to make sure that every deliverable we do is really appropriate and effectively connecting with our diverse audiences,” Rojas said.

 

Agencies such as Alma, which has its roots in Latin culture, interchangeably work on different types of accounts. “We don’t like to label ourselves,” said Isaac Mizrahi, CEO of Alma and author of the book “Hispanic Market Power.”

 

“With the Latino population at the threshold of crossing 20% of the population, or a much higher percentage of millennials and Gen Z consumers, you don’t have to pick sides, you can be both a great agency and a great multicultural agency,” he added.

 

Culture versus pop culture

 

These younger audiences are now more culturally diverse in how they identify themselves and the types of content they consume, making multicultural expertise more necessary for brands and agencies.

 

For example, Peso Pluma, a regional Mexican music artist, is one of the hottest artists right now and was YouTube’s most-viewed artist in 2023 over big names such as Drake and Taylor Swift. Pluma’s popularity speaks to how multicultural is ingrained in culture; to be sure, this is not a new premise, with hip-hop influencing advertising since the 90s.  

 

Moreover, Gen Zers are more openly diverse in their sexual orientations.

 

A recent report found that 28% of Gen Z adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. That compares to 16% of millennials and 7% of baby boomers who identify as LGBTQ+, according to the same report.

 

As a result, some brands are broadening the multicultural term and embracing the term “culture” instead to fit their specific target goals. Over the last several years, the term culture has significantly grown as a way to describe assignments, positions and business units within agencies and brands.

 

TBWA opened a cultural intelligence unit in 2016 called Backslash, which is focused on reporting on industry trends. And in 2019, The Martin Agency set up the Cultural Impact Lab, which is centered around brand activations, PR, talent sourcing for projects and other topics. These remits and practices can often straddle the line between pop culture, subculture and at times multicultural work.

 

There’s also been a move for brands to hire so-called culture agencies. Chipotle works with influencer and social agency Day One as its “culture agency,” while Patrón and Taco Bell have assigned MTW agency and Cashmere, respectively, to culture agency of record remits. (MTW connected Patrón with Becky G for a campaign created by M Booth last summer.)

 

But all three agencies are different: Day One specializes in influencer and social marketing while Cashmere and MTW have roots in multicultural marketing. This raises the question of which types of agencies should be charged with leading marketing around culture.

 

Understanding subcultures

 

McDonald’s is an example of a mass-market brand that has been successful in understanding different subcultures—in February, the burger chain introduced its own anime. It has long used marketing that hits on different cultures, while also resonating with a mainstream audience.

 

Much of that work has been done by Wieden+Kennedy, but the chain also works with agencies that specialize in reaching market segments—such as IW Group for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders marketing, Alma for Latino marketing and Walton Isaacson for African American and LGBTQ+-focused campaigns.

 

Similarly, Hyundai Motor America has separate agencies of record for marketing to Asian, African American and Hispanic audiences. Last week, the automaker’s African American agency of record Culture Brands launched a new campaign called “The Drop.” 

 

Daniel Maynez, a manager of multicultural marketing at Hyundai Motor America, said the automaker’s multicultural marketing encompasses African American, Asian and Hispanic marketing efforts. How “multicultural” is defined depends on how each organization defines it, he said.

 

“That’s not to say that we don’t have additional efforts that support diversity, equity, and inclusion, LGBTQIA+, or other ethnic and culturally diverse groups,” Maynez said. “It just means something different to everyone.”

 

Team Epiphany, which was acquired by Stagwell in January, calls itself a culture-first agency because of its diverse staff and ability to connect brands to different communities, co-founder Coltrane Curtis said.

 

“The agency also specializes in decoding culture—not only understanding what’s trending, but where those trends are coming from, why they are trending and forecasting where they will go in the future,” Curtis said. “This leads to a term that we use called ‘aspirational multiculturalism’ that meets your target consumers and communities where they would like to be and what they are working towards. It takes into consideration their hopes for family, friends and community versus leaning in on traditional, outdated or stereotypical beliefs about the target.”

 

Not just anyone can be an expert on specific cultural segments, according to Aaron Walton, CEO of Walton Isaacson, which works with clients such as McDonald’s, American Airlines and Lexus. “You can’t just create a title, create a department and not have the history, the passion or the depth of understanding for that particular culture,” Walton said.

 

After working with American Airlines as its multicultural agency, Walton Isaacson was brought on as the carrier’s creative AOR in 2022 and launched its first spot for the brand the following year. The spot featured diverse travelers utilizing the airline’s different services.

 

“Whether it’s segment-specific work or a broader work order, the segments are included in the broader work,” Walton said. “Whether it’s American Airlines or whomever we’re working with, we make sure we are accurately reflecting a culture and not playing into stereotypes or a perceived understanding of who they are based on a notion that people that aren’t in the segment have about the segment.”

 

Jason Campbell, chief creative officer of Translation, said in a February interview that the word “culture” is being “co-opted” in the industry. “Most of the people using the word don’t know what the word means or are mistaking popular culture for culture,” Campbell said.

 

Steve Stoute, who founded Translation 20 years ago, recently told Ad Age it was initially hard to sell the idea of creating work through a cultural lens because it was considered niche.

 

“Whether it was culture or diversity, those topics back then meant nothing, and now they mean everything,” Stoute said. He added that many agencies now lie about their cultural expertise.

 

Joe Anthony, the founder and CEO of Hero Media and the Hero Collective, called what is happening in the industry “cultural appropriation in the absence of cultural fluency.”

 

If you don’t have people of color being empowered through budgets and C-suite positions to influence the work a brand does, the work won’t be “authentic,” Walton added.

 

“You can’t have cultural insights without it being underpinned by Black and brown insights, because Black and brown culture drives popular culture,” Anthony said. “The problem right now is that culture is becoming the new “Total Market.”

 

“Total market” refers to a phenomenon in which the industry shifted from targeting particular multicultural segments to strategies that appeal to a multicultural nation.

 

“‘Total market’ was like the dark days of multicultural,” Velez said. “The promise of ‘total market’ had very good intentions; it’s actually where we kind of are today. But it was hijacked by the general market to mean that you don’t need to focus on these diverse audiences because the bigger sort of traditional linear general market networks can reach them in this passive way. It took the multicultural marketplace a few steps back, decreased the investments and multicultural experts were no longer being contracted to do some of the work.”

 

Pop culture and culture are very different things, and pop culture is often used to appropriate culture, according to Anthony.

 

“Culture is the contribution that a collection of people make to society based upon their traditions, their backgrounds, etc., and if you don’t understand the origins of people and how they self-identify and why and how they create the cultural offerings to society and the reasons behind it, you’re always just going to be chasing trends and calling that culture marketing,” Anthony said.

 

“Access to these people determines who gets to be the purveyors of culture, and because I’m a small agency, I don’t have access to the CMOs of XYZ, I can’t counterbalance or counteract the cultural BS that somebody else is feeding to this person,” he added.

 

Dove and Beats by Dre. are among the brands that have launched campaigns with a clear “cultural point of view,” according to Anthony.

 

“Dove doesn’t sell soap, they sell self-confidence. That’s their cultural currency,” Anthony said. “They want to add value to women’s lives by changing a cultural standard that has perpetuated the way that women feel, which then makes women feel good about themselves,” he said.

 

“If you’re not utilizing your campaign, to invest in a cultural point of view that adds value to society in some material way, then you’re not doing cultural marketing,” Anthony added. “You’re creating cultural campaigns that leverage people with other cultural equity that you’re trying to attach yourself to.”

 

Measuring influence

 

While many industry leaders don’t agree on whether or not the term multicultural should change, most agree it has less to do with the terminology and more about the intent of marketing to diverse audiences.

 

IW’s Song said marketing should evolve to where it should be measured by influence rather than ethnicity or size of a population.

 

“I’m not married to the word,” Walton said. “What I’m committed to is getting marketers and the advertising industry to value the art and science of marketing to specific cultural segments, using specific cultural insights and getting the budgets to align with the power of these consumer segments.”

 

“If the word ‘multicultural marketing’ goes completely away, I and many of us, fear that it would leave the consciousness of marketers,” said Dávila, who helped coin the term and has worked at companies such as Coca-Cola Co., Sears Roebuck & Co. and Walt Disney. “It’s less about the appropriateness of the word to describe consumers; it’s more about the internal corporate meaning that it has.”

 

Anthony said he’s an advocate of keeping the term multicultural.

 

“There’s still the need to drill down and talk to specific sub-segments of the community, certain communities that need to be celebrated, acknowledged, called out in ways that make them feel unique and acknowledged within your targeting.”

 

Dávila said one issue is some marketers use multicultural as a one-size-fits-all term.

 

“Some companies might be only doing Hispanic [marketing] but then they still call it multicultural,” Dávila said. “When you have a multicultural marketing department, define it.”

16323: How Multicultural Marketers Might Have Prevented Bud Light Mess.

 

To play off the thought of the previous post, the Bud Light–Dylan Mulvaney scenario might have been averted if multicultural marketers—or multicultural marketing practices at least—had been integrated.

 

For starters, Bud Light faces a significant—albeit common—challenge experienced by big brands today; that is, how to connect with a huge audience featuring diverse sub-segments.

 

The former Bud Light VP of Marketing reportedly sought to make the beer less “fratty” and more “inclusive”—yet seemingly did not consider that the “fratty” folks might negatively react to being in the same party with “inclusive” drinkers.

 

InBev and Bud Light have been sorta secretive about identifying the advertising agency, media firm, or whomever was behind the Dylan Mulvaney promotion, so it’s tough to call out the culprit—if there even is one.

 

But it could be argued that the creators failed to utilize a multicultural marketing fundamental: crossover appeal. While the term has a variety of meanings, there are applications for Bud Light. In short, multicultural marketers must always direct the message to its specific, intended audience—while being cognizant of how the concept might play across audiences. Apparently, no one was legitimately woke in this scenario.

 

Just a thought.

 

PS, To make a sloppy segue, check out the source of this post’s illustration depicted above.

15932: Multicultural Marketing As Easy As 1-2-3.

 

Need to create cross-cultural design? There’s an app for that.

13637: Probing Pepsi’s Problems.

Campaign published another perspective by a pseudo-thought leader taking advantage of the Pepsi-Kendall Jenner debacle to leverage personal agendas. In this case, Reframe The Brand Founder and CEO Jeffrey L. Bowman opined the disaster resulted from a “monocultural workplace” that presumably led to cultural cluelessness. Bowman actually makes a few interesting points, including “Women have become the new black”—which is essentially recognizing the rise of diverted diversity in the industry. Plus, Bowman nicely notes that diversifying a staff isn’t enough; in fact, the benefits of diversification can be negated if the workplace environment remains dominated by a singular culture. That is, slowly seeding racial and ethnic minorities into White World isn’t really achieving the true goal. Regardless, it’s tough to agree that Pepsi’s current advertising problems are rooted in failed diversity. After all, some of the brand’s greatest campaigns with the broadest appeal were created decades ago by White advertising agency BBDO. And blaming things on the in-house model is too easy. Maybe there’s a simpler explanation. It seems like the dilemma started with the 2008 birth of the globe logo and escalated to global lameness. In short, Pepsi has become a shitty client.

When black and brown is not enough

By Jeffrey L. Bowman

Pepsi’s epic failure is emblematic of the problems of a monocultural workplace, writes the founder and CEO of Reframe The Brand.

PepsiCo has a long history that demonstrates the company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion efforts. Most recently, the company won the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Award. The Kendall Jenner spot, however, was both a failure of epic proportions and completely avoidable. That’s been reviewed ad nauseum. The larger question is how did this event happen? And how did it happen to a brand like Pepsi with a legacy of getting commercial advertising right?

It’s simple. Women have become the new black.

Women are the new sought after target. Supporting feminism is the new message to be aligned with. As women move on up so too does corporate spending and marketing attention.

My hypothesis is that Pepsi thought that swapping a gender issue (demonstrated in Kendall dropping her artificial look) for a black one (the Black Lives Matter movement) was OK. Women? Blacks? They’re all underserved right?

The real issue isn’t Pepsi. It’s that it’s actually easy to see how they came to that conclusion. When you dissect it, Pepsi was again very much operating in “the marketing norm.”

So how did we get here? Over the past 30 years, we’ve put a lot of great minds and effort towards getting it right. The major shift birthed from the economic results of trade agreements with foreign governments in the 1980’s led to a boom in titles like chief diversity and inclusion officers with various reporting structures for most Fortune 500 companies. This sounds like a great thing, but there was one major oversight. Even though the workplace population was shifting and growing a multicultural candidate pool, diverse candidates were entering a monocultural workplace.

What’s a monocultural workplace? It is a business environment dominated by a singular culture. Which means that even if the faces of the organization have become more diverse, its practices and culture stay largely the same. Individuals are encouraged to participate but when push comes to shove, everyone is expected to fall into single file. That singularity is the mono of the monocultural workplace.

Last month, the findings of our “State of the Total Market Industry Vertical Report” revealed big brands and agencies within the workplace are two generations culturally removed from the marketplace. This means marketing practices are still very much a product of the 1960s as well as the workplace. Back then, the sought-after target was the upwardly mobile blacks, 20 years later the growing Hispanic population, and so on. Today the minority du jour is women. The mission is feminism and thus we see a lot of “separate but equal” budgets once reserved for people of color directed at women, primarily white women. This should be a good thing, but in reality, it’s not because the real underlying issue remains.

Black or female in 2017, we now have specialized hiring practices and specialized practitioners. But those “specialized practitioners” wind up isolated, underfunded, and misunderstood. They are viewed as necessities and so they exist, but the hands of the specialized practitioners are often cuffed by the monocultural operations of the place where they work. This means the employees of these groups wind up short when it comes to the tools and resources they really need to understand the new marketplace. Again, Pepsi is not immune.

I believe the team at Pepsi produced this commercial with the best of intentions with targeting, however, they simply lacked the cultural insights needed to get it right.

According to industry sources, PepsiCo shifted away from the idea of cultural fluency structural support, education and tools when Javier Farfan left PepsiCo in 2014. They did not see the immediate volumetric gains and dismantled their cultural fluency group. In doing so, they also lost key senior leaders who had their pulse on culture and the idea of developing a culturally-maturing organization from the inside-out diminished. They lost their insights and soon after the Pepsi marketing team too became a victim of the lens of their own monocultural workplace. They tried, and I believe tried hard, to get it right. But they didn’t have the leadership for what they needed to succeed.

The result? The internet is calling for the removal of Kendall Jenner’s head. We are looking for a responsible party, someone to blame. Pepsi is faceless; Kendall is not. But the real guilty party is our own workplace. Everyone needs to ask, is the company we work for diverse but monocultural?

If you’re not sure, you’re not alone. From Hollywood to Silicon Valley to Wall Street, every practitioner within the talent and diversity space is asking, “How do we avoid being Pepsi?”

There has to be a major rethink and disruptive ideation to modernizing brands and agencies from the inside-out. There’s a lot of work to be done.

—Jeffrey L. Bowman is an author, founder and CEO of Reframe The Brand.

13572: Total Market, Total Failure…?

Campaign published a perspective and sales pitch from Jeffrey L. Bowman, who is still trying to peddle what was once dubbed Cross-Cultural Marketing and later renamed Total Market. Pepper Miller delivered detailed dissections of the direction, and White advertising agencies ultimately hijacked the notion to seize total control of marketing budgets. Meanwhile, Bowman is selling a report on Total Market that will likely be totally ignored by the total industry.

Close the gap: The state of the ‘total market’ industry

By Jeffrey L. Bowman

If we do not get the total market topic right, businesses could lose the next 50 years of market share, writes author and founder of Reframe: The Brand.

We should have gotten it right by now, but we haven’t. We’ve had the data, the tools, the observation skills and the creativity to recognize a bad plan, and yet little has changed in almost 60 years.

That bad plan could be called “Separate But Equal Marketing,” and it was introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. It was inappropriate at the time and has been ineffective since then—and with good reason. McKinsey introduced the topic of “Total Market” in the mid-1960s. At the time corporations were not paying attention to the upward and mobile black consumer. Companies started creating ethnic marketing departments to target blacks and diversity compliance initiatives for their employees in the 1960s. The marketing and communications industry created two different ways of buying services known as “general market” to focus on the “mass” consumer audience and “ethnic marketing,” which later became “multicultural marketing,” to focus on blacks, Hispanics and Asian consumers. Over the last 50 years, nothing changed.

In 2010, the topic of general market and multicultural marketing was revisited at great length and reinvented through the innovation of total market. However the topic was more relevant and it was defined as a new way of buying services from suppliers whose offerings reflected the new America. The innovation, definition and approach were met with resistance and pushback from general market, ethnic and some industry associations. Why? This required structural changes for buying services within the $350 billion marketing and communications industry. As a result, we’re still pursuing a direction that proves inefficient and ineffective. But there is a clear and better way forward.

After five years of weathering the total market topic storm, my team and I sought to uncover why there is resistance to innovation and provide clarity on the topic, while committing resources to providing educational leadership. To identify industry best practices, we conducted over 50 interviews and observations with leading brands, agencies and collected data at conferences and through many hours of desk research. With our inaugural “State of the Total Market Industry Vertical Report,” our goal was to help others truly understand and apply the principles needed for their best employee and consumer outcomes.

If we do not get the total market topic right, businesses could lose the next 50 years of buying consumption. Why? Statistics show that the entire human race is going to flip generationally, racially, ethnically, religiously and in terms of gender, creating a new marketplace and workplace. Therefore we should stop using dated service models, and companies should have new ways of creating value in the new workplace and marketplace.

What’s wrong with the way things are now? Today, a business chooses to buy marketing and communications services based on a segregated model in which general market is separate from multicultural. If you are talent or a business owner within the marketing and communications industry, your ideas and services are likely chosen or purchased based on this model and often multicultural service providers get the short end of the stick even though the multicultural consumers have the highest growth demographically.

Based on our report findings, employees within major brands are two generations culturally removed from consumers. Most big companies culturally reflect a monocultural society or a homogeneity, whereas, culturally in America, there is the debate about moving away from multicultural society to either cross-cultural or poly-cultural society.

Because of the macro cultural and population shift, accept that this is just as much of an employee (workplace) outcome as a consumer (marketplace) outcome. In order for this to work, it has to start internally and then impact externally. You have to have the talent within the organization to fully comprehend and execute the total market approach for the new marketplace and the total market enterprise approach for the new workplace. This starts with education.

This is not a quick sales lift action. If you are attempting to use the total market approach for marketplace results, focus first on strategy, then execution. Many in advertising and marketing have tried using this approach without any strategic planning or outside help. There is now a graveyard of brands that rushed into this only to have discovered their organization was not mature enough. They’ve reverted back to the old and ineffective models. You don’t have too.

Expect some structural changes. For more than 60 years, brands and their service providers have allocated resources and funding under the model of “separate but equal,” meaning mass and multicultural audiences are equal. As multicultural audiences are increasingly the mass audience, this presents a fundamental opportunity about how to restructure budgets, partnerships and departments to accelerate growth within this new marketplace and workplace.

Be honest with yourself and your organization to drive structural change and transformation. Organizations first have to identify and accept where the gaps exist in understanding and acting within the new marketplace and workplace. This requires you to assess your organization.

We are committed to transforming the work and marketplace and are partnering with Campaign US to share our findings over the next several months. Our ambition is to make a difference for the future of the work and marketplace and redirect the industry towards a better way forward. Please join us and #CLOSETHEGAP.

—Jeffrey L. Bowman is an author, and president and CEO of Reframe: The [Brand] – A Business Acceleration Platform.

12874: Playing Poker Or Solitaire…?

Advertising Age published a perspective by Reframe: The Brand Founder and Chairman Jeffrey Bowman, where the author attempts to rename “multiculturalism” as the “New Majority.” Um, the last time Bowman examined this specific topic, wasn’t he promoting the label of cross-cultural marketing while leading the segregated OgilvyCULTURE department? Whatever. Unfortunately, Bowman continues to clutter the conversation with fresh terms that no one really distinguishes from the stale terms—and no one really cares about. Hell, Bowman inadvertently underscores a key issue with his opening statements:

Let’s get a few of things out of the way. Yes, the advertising industry needs to hire more people of color. Yes, race relations are strained right now. Yes, immigration is a huge issue for the upcoming presidential campaign. And yes, Silicon Valley is still way too white. Do we all agree? Great. We’ve now all anted up in this particular game of poker.

The problem is, we do not all agree. The Current Majority on Madison Avenue—i.e., the confederacy of White folks—does not believe “the advertising industry needs to hire more people of color.” There is plenty of recurring evidence to support this fact. Plus, White people are holding all the cards in this “particular game of poker.”

As a result, Bowman’s “three big bets” likely won’t result in winning more credibility or crumbs.

How Brands and Agencies Can Win at Multiculturalism

Three Big Bets Companies Need to Place for New Majority Success

By Jeffrey Bowman

Let’s get a few of things out of the way. Yes, the advertising industry needs to hire more people of color. Yes, race relations are strained right now. Yes, immigration is a huge issue for the upcoming presidential campaign. And yes, Silicon Valley is still way too white. Do we all agree? Great. We’ve now all anted up in this particular game of poker.

None of this is news to brands and agencies. But something is changing fast—the complexion of America. The general market isn’t white anymore. In just a few years, the majority of people under 18 will be from minority populations. In a couple of decades, the majority of the nation will be minorities. And did you hear this? The millennial generation has come up with a new, better word for multiculturalism. They call it normal.

Winning this game is going to take a lot more than showing up and throwing a few pennies in the pot. Here are three big bets businesses need to place. Those that do will be guaranteed a winning hand.

1. Repudiate separate-but-equal marketing. Back in the 1960s, black-owned agencies were finally let into the club of major brand engagements. Now, Hispanic and Asian agencies are part of the mix, but the system is still a simple expansion of the 1960s quota system that first brought minority culture into advertising. We still have two “separate-but-equal” systems.

Procurement departments go out to secure external vendors and allocate a percentage of spend to what is called supplier-diversity programs. Internally, brands use diversity-and-inclusion initiatives to justify hiring and retaining diverse talent. That sounds good, but practically speaking, it’s just as flawed as the pre-Brown vs. Board of Education educational system was. As a result, brands are dramatically underinvesting in the fastest-growing parts of the marketplace. Nimble, authentic new brands are going to eat their lunch.

2. Change from the inside out. Today’s diversity-and-inclusion and supplier-diversity models falter in part because of the language used inside companies. Brands still speak of diversity as being an exercise in compliance. If they go beyond the strictures of the law, it’s a nice thing to do for society, but brands don’t yet act as if their future competitiveness depends on diversity—which it does.

The steady growth of diversity-and-inclusion and supplier-diversity systems has built up a large industry of training, education and organizational consulting. This industry is based on the belief that it is a civil right to have a diverse and inclusive work environment. The workplace that has been built adheres to that right and is compliant with the law. That’s table-stakes thinking again.

To succeed, companies need to drop the idea and nomenclature brought to them by compliance with external forces. Instead, brands need to see diversity as a crucial factor in being market-ready. In an era of unprecedented transparency and respect for authenticity, no company can fake diversity.

3. Put your money where your mouth is. Google recently created a new holding company called Alphabet, which got all kinds of press attention and anguished business hot-takes. In 2012, Walmart announced that 100% of its sales growth would come from multicultural segments. No one paid the slightest bit of attention. The former is a largely meaningless corporate reorganization, while the latter reflects a recognition of a massive cultural realignment by one of the world’s largest companies. Why no love for that?

Rebuilding companies from the inside-out to reflect the New Majority may not make the news yet, but it is going to shake up the way funds are allocated. Gone will be the days when, as I personally have experienced, shifting spending to the fast-growing Hispanic market means cutting marketing directed at blacks.

Once you place these bets, your brand or business will be open for New Majority customers. That means that, for the first time since the heyday of America’s white majority, your business will be ready to sell to every one of your potential customers. You will be targeting the real, total addressable market, not some artificial fraction thereof. And if you are among the first to figure this out, consumers and talent will seek you out.

Jeffrey Bowman is founder and chairman of Reframe: The Brand, a consulting firm that helps businesses prepare for the New Majority. Mr. Bowman was previously senior partner-managing director at Ogilvy & Mather New York.

12456: Super Bowl Inflategate.

MultiCultClassics will forgo an in-depth examination of the latest Super Bowl offerings from Madison Avenue—especially since too many White advertising agency wonks are already doing so. Rather, this post presents a few quick points to ponder.

In 2010, the Madison Avenue Project and NAACP presented a study—conducted by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida—that revealed the overwhelming majority of Super Bowl commercials were conceived by White creative directors.

So let’s review the progress five years later.

Black representation in the advertising industry has actually declined.

The Madison Avenue Project has essentially died.

White women have hijacked the diversity discussion.

While Super Bowl XLIX has been tainted by Deflategate, the advertising industry has created Inflategate. That is, White advertising agencies have been inflating the perception of diversity. Hiring figures are inflated via the addition of White women and global citizens. Collaboration and representation are inflated through cross-cultural smokescreens. The illusion of cultural competence is inflated by shamelessly producing patronizing poop.

Deflategate is being debated, scrutinized and investigated ad nauseam. Inflategate is business as usual in adland—and nauseating.

12373: Pepsi—Live For Now Meh.

Advertising Age reported Pepsi broke its codependence with Omnicom to create thoroughly boring messages via other partners. PepsiCo Chief Marketing Officer for Global Beverage Brands Kristin Patrick explained, “…[PepsiCo has] a very deep, long-going relationship with Omnicom and we are using them for many aspects of our 2015 campaign. But having said that, we want to find creative talent around the world that really suits whatever project we are working on. And for this one, we really wanted small, super-creative, nimble, fast [agencies]—a different spirit.” Okey-doke. However, the new Pepsi campaign underscores three points:

1. The scenario appears to be another example of how the commoditization of the advertising industry—fueled by the maneuverings of White holding companies—has resulted in a planet full of generic agencies. Now clients realize there are no significant differences or measurable advantages in concept quality if the work is shat out by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Fathom Communications or a startup in Bangladesh. Plus, places such as Bangladesh offer efficiencies in production and talent costs. Ironically, White holding companies typically tout global capabilities as a benefit to advertisers. Guess the clients aren’t buying the sales pitch.

2. The scenario also appears to be another example of an advertiser talking about global branding that ultimately resembles locally baked bullshit. A commercial from the new Pepsi campaign proclaims “Make It Epic” in a bold typeface. Epic fail would be a more appropriate statement. Sorry, but casting abroad may reduce residual costs; however, as rival Coca-Cola demonstrated, the characters don’t play internationally—except maybe with White people, who tend to look alike from continent to continent. In the end, clients seeking one global idea for each megabrand wind up with one mediocre mess.

3. Pepsi hasn’t simply lost its edge. The brand has lost its way.

No Omnicom, No Beyonce: Pepsi Taps Small Shops for New Global Ads

There Are No Celebs in the Latest ‘Live for Now’ Spots

By E.J. Schultz

Pepsi, which has a long-term relationship with Omnicom Group, is bypassing the holding company for its latest round of global ads. Instead, the cola brand is relying on two smaller independent agencies for the next evolution of its “Live for Now” campaign. The ads also do not include big-name celebrities, which have been a hallmark for recent Pepsi work, including a 2013 ad starring Beyonce.

The shift in direction is occurring under Kristin Patrick, PepsiCo’s chief marketing officer for global beverage brands who joined the company in May of 2013. In an interview, she stressed that “we have a very deep, long-going relationship with Omnicom and we are using them for many aspects of our 2015 campaign. But having said that, we want to find creative talent around the world that really suits whatever project we are working on. And for this one, we really wanted small, super-creative, nimble, fast [agencies]—a different spirit.”

The two chosen shops are New York-based Lloyd&Co, which describes itself as a “collective of 35 creative, spirited individuals” and Moondog, a New York-based boutique edit, graphic and design shop.

The four new ads will run throughout the world, including the U.S., Europe and Latin America. Pepsi described them as featuring “friends coming together and turning what could otherwise be an ordinary moment into something extraordinary.” The soundtrack is “High” by the American band Young Rising Sons. The end of the ads features the sung phrase “Ba Ba Ba Ba Ba” that Pepsi hasn’t used in years. The mnemonic was last widely used in an ad starring Britney Spears called “Joy of Pepsi” that ran in 2001.

The selection of the two smaller agencies for the high-profile ads is further proof of Pepsi’s willingness to look beyond Omnicom. The holding company had historically handled Pepsi via agencies such as TBWA/Chiat/Day and BBDO. More recently, Pepsi used a flexible agency model within Omnicom dubbed Galaxy that was designed to pull from various agencies. At the same time, the brand has given significant assignments to independent shop Mekanism, including a 2014 Super Bowl spot.

The new global ads do not include A-list star power, which marks a departure from Pepsi’s recent global advertising. In 2012 Pepsi made Beyonce a “global brand ambassador” and ran a 2013 ad starring her called “Mirrors” by Omnicom-owned 180 LA. In 2014, Pepsi’s global campaign was focused on soccer and included talent such as soccer star Leo Messi. That campaign was also by 180 LA.

Asked to comment on the status of the Beyonce deal, a PepsiCo spokeswoman said in an email that “Pepsi and Beyonce have enjoyed a longstanding relationship and we continue to be fans of her and her work. She will not be featured in our 2015 commercial advertising.”

Ms. Patrick said Pepsi will look to continue building relationships with celebrities and that Pepsi will “always be a brand linked to celebrity [and] cultural influencers and personalities across different aspects of culture.” But Pepsi’s marketing will also include “relatable consumers,” she added.