17541: The Tech Bro-ification Of Marketing Is Technically BS.

 

Time published content titled, “The Tech Bro-ification of Marketing,” whereby the author believes White men are seizing control of marketing despite being outnumbered by White women.

 

Okay, except it’s common knowledge the White men versus White women numbers skew in favor of females, but White men still dominate in positions of power and pay.

 

And don’t forget White men and White women—separately and collectively—do waaaaay better in the marketing arena than people of color.

 

The true problem remains the whitewashing—that is, white privilege, systemic whiteness, and white supremacy—of marketing.

 

The Tech Bro-ification of Marketing

 

By Miranda Shanahan

 

Miranda Shanahan is a brand consultant, content creator, and speaker.

 

Scroll through LinkedIn, and you will find a flurry of new job listings with curious titles: “Narrative Engineer”, “UGC Engineer”, “Media Engineer.” At first glance, they sound like entirely new disciplines. Look closer, and they feel suspiciously familiar. 

 

As someone who has built a decade-long career in the marketing industry, I wondered: Why are these marketing roles being relabeled? I took my question to social media. “Is marketing being rebranded so boys can do it too?” I quipped on TikTok between meetings. 

 

I checked back a few hours later, and my comments section was aflame with marketers, tech folk, and VCs. Some had sensed something was off but couldn’t quite name it; others shared the most absurd titles they’d come across; and some pushed back, arguing that something genuinely new was emerging.

 

The tech bro-ification of marketing is underway. It’s not the first time a profession has been repackaged like this. But beneath this trend lies a broader pattern around how work is named, coded, and valued. The question: why is this happening to marketing—and why now?

 

Part of the answer lies in who marketing has come to be associated with. According to a study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 67% to 70% of marketing practitioners are women, making it one of the few female-dominated fields in the corporate sector. Research consistently shows that as a profession becomes associated with women, its pay and status tend to decline, and marketing is no exception. Plenty of professions skew one way or another, but those patterns aren’t driven by biology but rather our cultural stereotypes about who is good at what kind of work. 

 

The marketing industry is a broad church, but decades of cultural shorthand have flattened it into something quite specific. Shows like Sex and the City and, more recently, Emily in Paris have portrayed marketing as women and gay men throwing parties and coming up with zany ideas. Over on social media, this has calcified into the “marketing girlie” trope: the personality hire who makes things pretty in Canva and forces her boss to do TikTok dances. The cliché of a tech bro, by contrast, is that of a hyper-optimized lone wolf genius. These are stereotypes, but they have economic implications. 

 

The perceived value of a profession, the language used to describe it, and who is seen to be performing it have always been intertwined. Before “software engineer” was a job title, coding was a secretarial task, mainly done by women. Cosmopolitan even ran an article in 1967 titled The Computer Girls, touting it as an ideal career for women.

 

Software was “soft” work versus the “hard” work of building physical things. Even Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist at NASA in the 1960s, described feeling like a misplaced “stepchild” among the hardware engineers.

 

Hamilton coined the term “software engineer” in an effort to get her work taken seriously, much to the amusement of her almost exclusively male colleagues. Yet through the 70s and 80s, “software engineering” emerged as a bona fide profession: well-paid, prestigious, and over time, predominantly male. 

 

There were many different forces responsible for the shifting demographics of the software engineering profession, but it is undeniable that changing language has a habit of changing who feels welcome. Research has shown that women are less likely to apply for roles unless they feel they are 100% qualified or, in other words, welcome. 

 

The same dynamic is now playing out in marketing in reverse. In consumer brands, marketing has always been a core discipline. I would argue Nike’s most valuable asset isn’t the technical spec of a sneaker, but the story around it. However, in Silicon Valley, the hierarchy works differently: those who build sit above those who sell. Except now the very thing they’ve relied on for growth—coding and technical creation—has been commoditized by AI.

 

The first inkling of recalibration came when tech bros suddenly started emphasizing the importance of taste. “Taste is a new core skill,” declared OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. “In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make,” pronounced technologist Paul Graham. 

 

As Snap CEO Evan Spiegel put it: AI makes it easier to build new products, so distribution is the biggest challenge facing consumer technology businesses. 

 

The truth is that taste, distribution, and marketing have always been important. But now that AI is cheapening other kinds of work, tech has been forced to admit that marketing actually matters. 

 

The problem is, “marketing” comes with baggage. Decades of cultural coding have made it a hard sell internally, so tech is dressing it up in clothes they feel comfortable wearing. Brand strategists become narrative engineers. Marketing managers become growth architects. This shouldn't be much of a surprise. Tech has a penchant for taking familiar ideas and selling them back to us as revolutionary. Taxis become Ubers, bed and breakfasts become Airbnbs. Marketing is just the Emperor’s latest outfit. 

 

In some cases, these roles are genuinely becoming more technical, but mostly the language is being stretched so thin it’s hard to separate reality from corporate fiction. Just like using a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician, using vibe coding and automation tools doesn’t make you an engineer. Marketing has always been part science, part art. The irony is, AI is automating the technical parts faster than anything else. Creative intuition, human judgment, and, yes, taste, are still the hardest things to replace. Yet still, employers reach for technical language to signal value. 

 

Perhaps the upside will be that job titles with a technical veneer could command higher salaries and more respect from leaders who respond better to “engineer” than “marketer.” The problem, though, is the more we conflate value with tech, the more we devalue the art of marketing and the people who practice it.

 

It might not seem that deep, but marketing’s rebrand is part of a bigger pattern. When you control the vocabulary of a field, you decide who deserves a place. Tech has always been good at making familiar ideas feel like breakthroughs, and marketing is just the latest one.

16976: BHM 2025—On The White House & White Advertising Agencies, Part 7.

 

President Donald J. Trump’s antics continue to mirror Adland—right down to the handling of Black History Month.

 

Trump issued a proclamation (depicted above) recognizing February 2025 as National Black History Month. To date, he has not taken any intentional actions to honor the event. Indeed, Trump’s attacks on DEI arguably counter the official rhetoric.

 

This behavior is typical of White advertising agencies, where BHM enthusiasm is proclaimed, yet not demonstrated with deliberate initiative. There is no walk to justify and/or support the talk.

 

Trump and his sycophantic cronies position themselves as disruptors of the political status quo. The performative proclamations, however, perpetuate White supremacy and systemic racism—it’s all business as usual.

16714: National Ice Cream Day In Adland.

 

Today is National Ice Cream Day. Adland celebrates with scoops of vanilla in White bowls on White tables…

16057: Inclusive Musical Sings With Latent & Blatant Exclusivity.

 

“Interracial Couple In A Cheerios Ad” is explained as follows:

 

Two comedians and advertising creative directors, David Roth and Yuriy Mikhalevskiy, have launched a music video teasing the advertising industry for its awkward treatment of race and social issues. The video is called “Interracial Couple in a Cheerios Ad” and is self-funded, not affiliated with the Cheerios marketing team.

 

Inspired by Walmart’s Juneteenth-flavored ice cream, Salesforce’s non-binary corporate mascot Astro, and Kendall Jenner’s BLM Pepsi ad, plus countless displays of performative inclusivity in meetings, the creative directors were inspired to poke fun at the industry.

 

Their Cheerios commercial is the opening number as they hope to fund a full-length Inclusive Musical which includes other songs like “Pride Month’s A-Comin’,” “New Black Lesbian Hire,” and “You’re Absolutely Right, But You’re White.”

 

This promotional project appears to represent the song-and-dance that White advertising executives routinely perform to conceal and/or deny their feelings of White Fragility, White Genocide, White Guilt, White Privilege, White Rage, and White Supremacy. The vanity URL—InclusiveMusical.com—links to an Indiegogo page for like-minded investors to provide financial support.

 

Yet even in this video scenario, the decision-making partners are White advertising agency leaders and racially/ethnically ambiguous clients. Can’t help but wonder if “Interracial Couple In A Cheerios Ad” is a parody or unintentional investigative documentary.

 

 

15264: I Scream For Anti-Racism & Equality.

Did anybody else see this Ben & Jerry’s post and think, “Is Stan Richards freelancing—seeking to make amends for his indiscretions?”

15142: Saatchi & Saatchi Promotes White Supremacy, Er, White Power.

Saatchi & Saatchi in Thailand created an Oral-B campaign featuring the tagline, “White is Great.” Brilliant. Oh, and the concept presents light-skinned casting too.

 

 

 

14173: Extremely Qualified.

Adweek reported Grey New York partnered with anti-extremist group Small Steps to hatch a campaign countering White supremacist hate speech in the U.K. Why tap a White advertising agency in the U.S. to address racism in the U.K.? Surely Grey London is equally qualified to handle the subject matter. Hell, does Small Steps even realize White advertising agencies are rooted in White supremacy?

Facebook and Grey New York Work to Combat White Supremacist Hate Speech in the U.K.

Created with anti-extremist group Small Steps

By Patrick Coffee

What is hate speech, exactly?

However one may feel about the tension between free speech and language as a weapon, there is little doubt that various forms of extremist behavior and the intentionally offensive content that comes with them have grown more visible online in recent years. Some point to social media as the primary culprit.

In order to combat that perception and help some individuals find their way back from the extremes, Facebook has partnered with ad agency Grey New York and Small Steps, an organization seeking to help counter far-right extremism in the U.K., for a new campaign.

The work centers on this profile of a now-former member of a white supremacist group. He is one of a group of Small Steps trainers and supporters who are covering their old racist tattoos.

The project also includes a series of Instagram videos in which graffiti artists explain—and proceed to cover up—symbols popular among white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups.

It’s part of a Facebook initiative called Create Against Hate, which brings disparate young creators together and “aims to eradicate and make a stance against hate, discrimination, and extremism on our platforms by establishing a movement within the creative industry and with partners like Small Steps,” according to a spokesperson for the social network.

“Having joined the Far Right as a teenager, I know young people in particular are at risk of being groomed into the movement,” said Small Steps founder Nigel Bromage. “That’s why we need to be talking to them directly: online, and in a way that they can relate to.”

This is not the only recent creative project to target extremism. Multicultural agency Alma recently worked with the ex-neo-Nazi behind Free Radicals on a campaign to help counter internet search queries that often facilitate extremist ideologies.

13787: Michael Roth’s Racism Rant.

AgencySpy posted a memo from IPG CEO Michael Roth, who condemned the racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Roth failed to receive a Twitter spanking from President Donald Trump, probably because Roth doesn’t register a mini-blip on Trump’s radar. Hell, the moron only earned a post on AgencySpy—and a probable ADCOLOR® Award nomination. Roth will undoubtedly copy the memo into the holding company’s gobbledygook on diversity and inclusion. Yet given the historical cultural cluelessness at IPG, Roth speaking out against racism is like, well, a White supremacist speaking out against racism.

13240: White Supremacy In Adland.

Advertising Age published a perspective titled, “Five Ways Agencies Can Dismantle Systems Keeping Diversity Out”—and the author declared White supremacy is a root cause of the global dilemma. Actually, White supremacy is not as big a problem as White complacency in our industry. That’s why the “Five Ways” don’t present a true solution. Why would Madison Avenue’s ruling majority consider taking five action steps when they haven’t even bothered to take a single step toward progress? Hell, the typical advertising agency leader makes the average Grand Wizard look like a Boy Scout.

Five Ways Agencies Can Dismantle Systems Keeping Diversity Out

Ad Agencies Would Be Remiss If They Did Not Address the Uncomfortable Topic of White Supremacy in the Industry

By Bethany Iverson

I’m grateful to those taking up the charge to build an industry reflective of the world we live in, though we would be remiss to talk about the progress we’re working toward without addressing the most pressing and uncomfortable issue keeping diversity out of agencies. I’m talking about white supremacy—a core component of inequality most ad agency folks are reluctant to acknowledge.

Wait! Don’t stop reading, I know it seems dramatic to see the words “white supremacy” and “ad agency” in the same sentence, but hear me out. My hope in writing about such a charged topic is not to shame our industry, but rather to start a conversation about the root problem preventing us from being inclusive. Once we move past the initial shock, it becomes clear that white supremacy is nearly invisible in our everyday lives—all the more reason to call it out.

White supremacy is an ugly term with an uglier past, conjuring images of Nazis and the KKK, undoubtedly two of the reasons it’s uncomfortable talking about it. It’s a shameful part of our history we’d rather bury because acknowledging it means we’re complicit and that’s all it takes to shut most of us down. That said, it’s critically important to acknowledge a much wider definition of white supremacy apart from the overtly racist symbols of Civil Rights-era America and hate groups. It’s our misguided aversion to the subject of white supremacy that keeps wide-reaching, sustainable diversity beyond our grasp.

To further complicate things, the phrase “white privilege” is sometimes confused with “white supremacy.” While we’ve begun to open up about privilege in recent years, our role in the system of white supremacy has gone largely unaddressed. Put simply, white privilege represents all the perks we have as white people. White supremacy is why white privilege exists; it’s the system our industry was built on because it’s the system our country was built on. Evidence of white supremacy can be found in imbalanced political power and representation, incarceration rates and sentencing disparities, wage gaps and skewed unemployment rates, discriminatory housing practices, and inequitable access to education. Acknowledging white privilege without addressing white supremacy is like treating a symptom while ignoring the disease.

Our industry was born to push against complacency and yet when it comes to issues of race we find ourselves quietly burrowing into it. We navigate our way through oftentimes cloudy conversations about diversity without understanding that it is we who continue to hold it back. But we can do something about it.

Here are five immediate actions we must take to meaningfully address the structural inequities in our industry. I offer these in addition to best practices such as recruiting from historically black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions; tapping professional organizations dedicated to advancing young people of color; continually investing in employees of color via mentorship; and unconscious bias training for managers:

1. Remove four-year college degree requirements, create an apprenticeship program for new talent (or partner with an organization like BrandLab), and recruit from places like community and technical colleges.

2. Create culturally competent agency leaders. There are organizations in every major market dedicated to helping people learn about racial equity (shout out to Interaction Institute for Social Change and the YWCA).

3. Get other white people thinking critically about race by facilitating discussions with co-workers in a judgment-free zone where they don’t have to be afraid of saying the wrong thing.

4. Make it easy for agency employees to develop a deeper understanding of race and racism by organizing a listserv, blog or book club dedicated to articles, podcasts and books by people of color.

5. Don’t monopolize the conversation. You should be listening more than talking in conversations with people of color who are working to address our industry’s structural inequities.

It’s time to get comfortable being uncomfortable. Our privilege will always prevent us from perfectly navigating discussions about race and inequity. We’ll make inaccurate statements and ask awkward questions in front of friends and colleagues of color. I’ve personally fumbled my way through countless conversations about race, I’ve inadvertently offended people I respect, and I’ve resigned myself to continue trying. What matters is that we don’t let shame or pride get in the way of progress. And that we don’t try to fool ourselves into thinking we’re making measurable strides toward an inclusive future unless we’re also willing to talk about the ways the industry we built is set up at the expense of diversity.

Bethany Iverson is director of strategy at Space150, a full-service digital ad agency.

10519: Bigot Bash.

USA TODAY reported White supremacists will hold a gala get-together in Tennessee. The event is being organized by Stormfront, a “White Pride, White Power” website. Stormfront’s proprietor, ironically, is a moron named Don Black.

White supremacists to gather in Tenn.

By Anita Wadhwani, The (Nashville) Tennessean

A Caucasian heritage and $75 are the price of entry into this weekend’s international conference for white supremacists in East Tennessee organized by Stormfront, the oldest website devoted to the “white pride, white power” movement.

Like a Facebook for white supremacists, Stormfront is the virtual gathering space for like-minded people to meet, post and respond to messages, tell jokes and offer political commentary in a variety of labeled discussion groups that range from “fighting white genocide” to poetry.

The Tennessee conference represents a rare offline gathering for Stormfront members. The two-day agenda includes a luncheon and workshops on immigration, political organizing and communications by some of the movement’s best-known contemporary leaders.

“This will be a national conference, drawing people from around the United States and Canada,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate groups. But the 150-mile radius surrounding the meeting includes concentrations of active supremacist groups most likely to attend, he said.

Former presidential candidate David Duke will lead “an informal nature walk through the Smokies” on Day 2 of the conference, which begins Saturday. Duke is the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and Louisiana lawmaker. The conference is limited to 150 people, but it’s unclear how many will attend.

More than 30 white supremacist organizations operate in Tennessee, representing the five strains of supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League. They are neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, “traditional” movements like the Ku Klux Klan, racist prison gangs and “Christian identity” groups that espouse the belief that God favors white people.

Paul Fromm, a Canadian resident who broadcasts his own online radio show from Ontario via the Stormfront site, is coming to the conference to give a presentation about the perils of immigration in North America.

“Basically if the present trends continue, the founding set of people will be a minority in America in 2041,” Fromm said.

10403: Post-9/11 Discrimination Must End.

From USA TODAY…

Column: Post-9/11 discrimination must end

By Deepa Iyer

Eleven years ago, on the first Saturday after the Sept. 11 attacks, a Sikh man was shot and killed in Mesa, Ariz. Flash forward to this past Sunday, when a gunman attacked a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis., leaving six people dead. When will this end?

I have been asking myself this question over the past few days. Though Wade Michael Page, an apparent white supremacist, committed this massacre, each of us is responsible for what happens next. Our elected leaders, though, have a duty to take concrete actions to prevent another Oak Creek tragedy.

For many of us in the Sikh, Muslim, Arab-American or South-Asian communities, the recent tragedy is part of a history of bias and discrimination since 9/11. There has been a tendency to view the post-9/11 backlash only in the distant past. In the year after 9/11, anti-Muslim hate crimes rose by nearly 1,600%. Although these numbers have not been as high over the past 11 years, bias incidents continue to be reported and the climate of prejudice has arguably become worse.

It manifests itself in different ways: a mosque blocked for the past two years from being developed in Tennessee; a Bangladeshi cab driver brutally assaulted in New York because his passenger thought he was Muslim; and a mosque in Missouri destroyed by a suspected arson a day after the Oak Creek tragedy. It extends to politicians, such as Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., holding anti-Muslim hearings and Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., making unsubstantiated claims that disloyal Muslims are infiltrating our government.

While these sentiments have been described as racism, Islamophobia or xenophobia, they are all related. Our nation was founded on the values of pluralism and religious freedom. A murderous attack like this, targeting a single faith, is an assault on our American ideals, whether those targeted are Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jews, or Christians.

We must not treat this crime as an isolated incident, or the result of a person with an extreme view on race. In our increasingly diverse country, we have a responsibility to include individuals of different backgrounds and faiths in our society. For our elected officials, this means denouncing bigoted statements and actions, affirming our ideals of inclusion, and ending practices of profiling.

The list of names of people who have lost their lives for simply being of a different color or faith grew by six this past week. Let us commit as a nation to putting an end to this growing list, once and for all.

Deepa Iyer is executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together.

10207: Defending In Black And White.

From The Chicago Tribune…

Public defender’s unsavory client poses dilemma

A young black lawyer entered the courtroom only to realize she would be representing an alleged white supremacist

By Annie Sweeney, Chicago Tribune reporter

MiAngel Cody, a young federal defender, was running an hour late for her 9:30 a.m. appearance in Courtroom 1386.

Representing a man on a deportation charge five floors away in the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse, she had no time to research her next case: 12 CR 00395. Such is the grind for a public defender on “duty day” — representing clients who can’t afford a private attorney for their initial court appearance.

It wasn’t until Cody reached the courtroom and leafed through the indictment that she learned the details of the charges against the heavily tattooed white man sitting next to her — he was accused of setting fire to his neighbor’s home because the family was black.

Cody is African-American. She had just been appointed to defend an alleged white supremacist.

Cody privately conferred at some length with defendant Brian James Moudry and then stood next to him before a federal judge to enter a plea of not guilty on Moudry’s behalf. Appointed by the court to represent the indigent Moudry, Cody is scheduled to be by his side again when the case is back in court later this week.

Cody would not consent to an interview for this article. And efforts to reach Moudry, who is locked up in a downtown federal jail, or his family were unsuccessful. But from the outside, the pairing would appear to be an uncomfortable one for both client and attorney.

Veteran criminal-defense lawyers, however, say attorneys often have to set aside personal misgivings about clients to fulfill their ethical obligations and ensure that justice is done. Those who know Cody said she is too committed to the defense of the poor to let Moudry’s beliefs interfere with her work.

“Our job is to represent people charged,” said Terry MacCarthy, who ran the federal defender’s office in Chicago for 42 years and still has an office there. “A good criminal-defense attorney can handle anything … He’ll be in real good hands with her. She is one very good and very bright lawyer.”

Moudry, 35, grew up in Marquette Park, a Chicago neighborhood with a history of racial tension, most notably in 1966 when Martin Luther King Jr. marched there to protest racist housing policies. Angry white residents lined the streets and pelted black marchers with rocks and bottles.

By contrast, Cody, 32, is a product of the South whose ancestors were sharecroppers and later civil rights activists, friends and family said. Fresh out of law school, she worked as a law clerk for a federal judge in Montgomery, Ala., where a 1955 bus boycott to protest segregation became a seminal moment in the civil rights struggle.

The two’s paths crossed by happenstance. Moudry, who didn’t have the money to hire an attorney, made his initial court appearance on the day Cody pulled “duty day” — a regular assignment for the attorneys in the federal defender’s office. The cases can vary widely — a single day could bring an accused drug trafficker, bank robber and child pornographer. Among the three cases Cody picked up on May 31 was Moudry’s.

The attorney appointed on that first day typically stays with the case to its conclusion.

“It is the difference between my job and her job,” said Ronald Safer, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice who knows Cody from her stint at the same law firm. “I can say ‘no, I detest what this person stands for, so I don’t care whether he has committed the crime.’ She has picked a job where she does not have that luxury. And that is one of the things that makes that job — the public defender — the most difficult job that exists in the legal system.”

Read the full story here.

5617: The Other Side Of Change.

From The Washington Post…

Hate Groups’ Newest Target
White Supremacists Report an Increase in Visits to Their Web Sites

By Eli Saslow, Washington Post Staff Writer

Sen. Barack Obama’s historic victory in the Democratic primaries, celebrated in America and across much of the world as a symbol of racial progress and cultural unity, has also sparked an increase in racist and white supremacist activity, mainly on the Internet, according to leaders of hate groups and the organizations that track them.

Neo-Nazi, skinhead and segregationist groups have reported gains in numbers of visitors to their Web sites and in membership since the senator from Illinois secured the Democratic nomination June 3. His success has aroused a community of racists, experts said, concerned by the possibility of the country’s first black president.

“I haven’t seen this much anger in a long, long time,” said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. “Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president.”

Such groups have historically inflated their influence for self-promotion and as an intimidation technique, and they refused to provide exact membership numbers or open their meetings to a reporter. Leaders acknowledged that their numbers remain very small—“the flat-globe society still has more people than us,” Roper said. But experts said their claims reveal more than hyperbole this time.

“The truth is, we’re finding an explosion in these kinds of hateful sentiments on the Net, and it’s a growing problem,” said Deborah Lauter, civil rights director for the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate group activity. “There are probably thousands of Web sites that do this now. I couldn’t even tell you how many are out there because it’s growing so fast.”

Neo-Nazi and white power groups acknowledge that they have little ability to derail Obama’s candidacy, so instead some have decided to take advantage of its potential. White-power leaders who once feared Obama’s campaign have come to regard it as a recruiting tool. The groups now portray his candidacy as a vehicle to disenfranchise whites and polarize America.

[Read the full story here.]