This PayDay commercial shows peanuts, caramel and White ad agencies love hip hop.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
10681: Annie The Chicken Queen Is A Fake!
There’s a new Popeyes commercial starring Annie the Chicken Queen—which cannot be found online, of course—where the spokeswoman is hawking the Cajun Crawfish Festival featuring her personally prepared cuisine. Except the fast feeder’s website shows the food is actually the creation of Amy Alarcon—and she’s a White woman!
Also on the website, a company timeline marks the year Annie appeared with the caption: Popeyes introduces feisty spokesperson “Annie” to tell it like it is on national television. You can’t make this shit up.
10680: AT&T & BBDO Tricks & Treats.
BBDO and AT&T present a Halloween commercial featuring treats like non-White casting and interracial romance—and tricks for the minority agencies, who were likely denied the opportunity to join the holiday fun since BBDO used non-White casting. Ah, the joys of cross-cultural marketing.
10679: Walmart Promises 100% More Crumbs.
Advertising Age reported Walmart Senior VP-Brand Marketing and Advertising Tony Rogers attended the latest ANA Multicultural Marketing and Diversity Conference and declared, “One hundred percent of the growth [in sales] is going to come from multicultural customers. … Our spending against multicultural customers will grow by at least 100%.” Last year, Rogers proclaimed Walmart would blow up its multicultural marketing budget, distributing the loot into individual business units versus segregated silos. Walmart appears to be making progress in recognizing minority audiences and agencies; however, there is still no public disclosure on the actual amounts invested. It’s common knowledge that minority targets are grossly underfunded, so doubling the amount of crumbs is still a pile of crumbs—in short, it would require much more than a 100% increase to make the totals sufficient.
Also worth noting is a comment from Walmart VP Creative Marketing Greg Warren, who spoke on supplier diversity. At most shoots, Warren noted 75% of the crew may be White. “There is still very little diversity at the ground level,” said Warren. Um, has this guy taken a close look at his White advertising agency?
Walmart’s Tony Rogers: 100% of Growth Is Multicultural
Plans to Double Its Ad Spending in Area
By Laurel Wentz
Walmart plans to double its multicultural ad spending as part of a sweeping initiative to move the company from a silo-like approach to making sure everyone takes responsibility for multicultural marketing.
“One hundred percent of the growth [in sales] is going to come from multicultural customers,” Tony Rogers, Walmart’s senior VP-brand marketing and advertising, told the audience at the ANA’s Multicultural Marketing and Diversity conference on Tuesday in Miami. “Our spending against multicultural customers will grow by at least 100%.” At last year’s ANA conference, Mr. Rogers created a stir by saying Walmart was going to “blow up the multicultural budget” and move it out of silos and into the business units to signal how serious the company is about improving its multicultural efforts. He was invited again this year, along with Greg Warren, Walmart’s VP-creative marketing, to report back on how it’s going.
Mr. Rogers outlined four key learnings: 1) Make multicultural part of everything you do, rather than projects in silos. 2) Train people. 3) Set goals and keep score. 4) Build partnerships and leverage people outside your company.
Walmart’s “aha” moment was a disconnect over the company’s layaway program, reintroduced last year in a huge initiative. But the Hispanic ad that ran on the popular Latin Grammy Awards show on Univision featured giggling girls buying Latin music CDs from Walmart.
“The ad we ran on the Latin Grammys didn’t mention layaway,” Mr. Warren said. “Our [Hispanic] agency Lopez Negrete did a great job doing what we asked them to do. We just weren’t asking them to do the right thing.”
“Layaway was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Mr. Rogers said. “The layaway team was working hard on layaway. The multicultural team was working hard on the Latin Grammys and not going to the layaway meetings. That was a real eye opener for me.”
There’s still a Latin Grammys effort, but now it’s a platform to talk about layaway, he said. This year, the Lopez Negrete spot features two soccer fans in jerseys from rival teams buying big screen TV sets at Walmart—on layaway.
Seat at the table
Warren said it’s also key to give multicultural agencies “a seat at the table” from the beginning. Previously, multicultural efforts would lag by several weeks or a month because the general market work was done first. This year, the Hispanic wireless-contract campaign took the lead in Walmart’s back-to-school wireless effort, and the general market followed.
Walmart ranked as the 16th biggest advertiser in Hispanic media with 2011 spending of about $60 million, according to Ad Age’s Hispanic Fact Pack.
“There’s an education process and a score-keeping process,” Mr. Rogers said. This year, an intensive tracking of multicultural efforts has been added to Walmart’s weekly Monday morning meetings to measure progress and look at numbers. “You know every Monday morning, you’re going to have a conversation about multicultural. [And] it’s on your performance review objectives, and it’s on mine. People may have three or four objectives, and multicultural is one of those things.”
In another initiative in the last year, Walmart set up a monthly multicultural advisory council that includes senior Walmart execs and the heads of Walmart’s multicultural agencies, including Alex Lopez Negrete, president-CEO of Lopez Negrete Communications; Don Coleman, chairman-CEO of African-American agency GlobalHue; and Nita Song, president-chief operating officer of IW Group. The group has already gone from quarterly to monthly meetings, in marathon four-hour sessions attended by Walmart CMO Stephen Quinn.
Supplier diversity
Walmart is also looking at driving diversity in its suppliers. At a shoot, for instance, Mr. Warren said 75% of the people he sees may be Caucasian. “There is still very little diversity at the ground level,” he said. So Walmart is doing a pilot program in Chicago in the production space, taking junior-level people “under our wing.”
Mr. Rogers said Walmart’s increased focus on multicultural can also help make its suppliers smarter in that area. “We had a supplier who was convinced their audience was Caucasian women,” he said. “We were able to show them that 40% of their business came from multicultural consumers.”
Mr. Rogers drew a round of applause from the ANA audience when he quoted one of his marketing managers, Javier Delgado, as saying that in some companies you have to ask permission to do a multicultural program, but at Walmart you’d now have to ask permission not to do one.
How successful is Walmart’s intense focus on multicultural marketing?
Mr. Rogers said, “I don’t think we would have volunteered to come back [to speak at the ANA] if it wasn’t working well.”
10678: The Breast Campaign Ever…?
Sexy breast cancer campaigns anger many patients
By Liz Szabo, USA TODAY
Campaigns like Feel Your Boobies and Save the Ta-Tas demean women and trivialize the disease, critics say.
Many breast cancer survivors say a crop of pink-ribbon campaigns have hit a new low—by sexualizing breast cancer.
An online porn site this month has been using breast cancer to increase its Web traffic by offering to donate 1 cent for every 30 views of its videos. The intended recipient for the donation, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, rejected the offer and instructed the site to stop using its name.
Yet pornographers are only the most extreme example of a disturbing trend: using sex to sell breast cancer—or simply get attention, say Gayle Sulik, author of Pink Ribbon Blues. Sulik, who recently lost a friend to the disease, notes that magazines and advertising campains now routinely use topless young women to illustrate a disease whose average victims are in their 60s.
“I don’t see the porn site to be much different from the ‘Feel your boobies’ T-shirts,” says Sulik, referring to the Pennsylvania-based Feel Your Boobies Foundation. “It sexually objectifies women, trivializes breast cancer … and uses the objectified woman as window dressing for the profit-making machine.”
Newer cancer groups are embracing slogans such as “Save the Ta-Tas” and “I Love Boobies” in the name of humor and reaching out to a younger, less conservative audience. Other groups say they’re trying to stand out from the crowd of public service announcements that arrive every October, during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
A poster for the “Save 2nd Base” fundraiser at Tao restaurant in Las Vegas last month, for example, depicted a curvy model in a string bikini, noting “everyone in pink bathing suits receives open bar.” An online version of the ad went viral, spread by outraged cancer survivors. The Las Vegas restaurant did not return phone calls for this story.
Although proceeds were to benefit Komen, the cancer group’s spokeswoman Andrea Rader says Komen hasn’t heard how much was raised, and won’t accept the donation. Rader says the Las Vegas restaurant was supposed to get Komen’s approval before launching the ads, but did not. “We would never have approved that,” Rader says. Rader notes that Komen, which has been criticized for its “cause marketing” partnerships with companies such as KFC, disapproves of coy language for body parts. “We just say ‘breasts,’” Rader says.
Breast cancer survivor Kathi Kolb used her skill with computer graphics to create an alternative “2nd Base” poster on her blog, the Accidental Amazon. Kolb’s version makes the bikini model look more like a real cancer patient: with a catheter port in her chest, a prosthesis in her bra and a compression sleeve on her arm to prevent swelling.
“It’s thinly disguised prurience,” says Kolb, 58. “The average guy may be moderately obsessed with breasts, but any guy who’s ever known any woman with breast cancer, the last thing he thinks is that breast cancer is sexy.” b Kolb says she’s been disgusted by sexy breast cancer campaigns for years, noting that many companies are manipulating customers’ compassion for commercial gain. But this year, she says, “is worse than ever.”
But Kimmy McAtee, spokeswoman for the Keep A Breast Foundation, says its “I Love Boobies!” campaign aims to “speak to young people in their own voice about a subject that is often scary and taboo.” T-shirts and bracelets “speak directly to our target audience in a way that is authentic, inspiring and refreshing. We always want to take a positive approach to breast cancer awareness, rather than a funny or sexy one.”
Even mainstream groups, such as the American Cancer Society, are using humor to get their message across. “It’s OK to look at our chests,” the society announces, with videos showing close-ups of women’s chests. On a site called makingstrideswalk.org/boobs, the society announces that a fundraising walk “was created to focus on breasts, and women are glad their chest has our undivided attention.”
The American Cancer Society says the “boobs” video was created to get people’s attention. In a written statement, the society said, “People are exposed to a wide variety of breast cancer information during National Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, and this video was intended to break through the clutter to capture the attention of social media users, who we want to encourage to spread the word about an important message: empowering women to take control of their breast health and fight back in their communities.”
Breast cancer survivor Lani Horn, 41, from Nashville, says these groups are missing the point. “All of us are really fed up,” Horn says. “Save the tatas? No, save the women. A lot of us had to give up our tatas to live.” Read the full story here.
10677: Welcome, Minorities.
Advertising Age published a column by Villanova assistant professor of marketing and business law Aronté Bennett titled, “Minorities Differ Much From Each Other, But Not When Reacting to Ads.”
Bennett conducted research that revealed insights like, “Contrary to popular belief, it’s not their racial or ethnic identity that determines minorities’ response to a brand, but rather, how welcoming they feel the brand is toward them. … The dominating factor that unites minorities in the marketplace is their treatment as outsiders who are not invited into the advertising process. This alienation stems from the way minorities are depicted in ads, as well as from the fact that the advertising world often overlooks them altogether.”
Not sure there’s anything new to Bennett’s findings. Multicultural marketing practitioners have been stating this stuff from the beginning.
It might be interesting, however, to apply the notions to advertising agencies. That is, agencies with inclusive tendencies—acting more welcoming to minorities—might create campaigns appealing to wide audiences. And agencies that are exclusive and unfriendly to minorities will create campaigns appealing to White audiences.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
10675: Get Your Hair Facts Straight.
This Pymes Magazine campaign from Argentina is kinda interesting…
…until it gets to the version with ironing hair. Is it really a legitimate example of entrepreneurism? Sources indicate straightening hair with heated irons dates back to ancient Egypt. And women with Black hair are not the exclusive audience for such services.
10673: I’m Every Woman.
The Business Insider presented 18 Ads That Changed How We Think About Women—and in typical exclusionary fashion, the list failed to include Aunt Jemima, the Pine-Sol Lady, the Honey Bunches of Oats Lady, Annie the Chicken Queen and the Talking Vagina from Summer’s Eve.
10671: The Future Children Project Rerun.
So long as politics are appearing in recent posts, it’s worth taking a second look at Jeff Goodby’s and Rich Silverstein’s video for The Future Children Project. Agency Spy spotlighted the piece and sparked a trashing debate of the message and messengers. Meanwhile, The Daily Caller revealed Goodby is “a registered ‘lapsed’ Republican.” Guess the extraordinarily contrived video could be called a lapse in judgment.
10670: War Child Toys With Stereotypes.
Hate to diss a noble and worthy cause, but not impressed with this War Child spot. Did a child conceive and produce it? The video opens with all the stereotypes addressed by Mama Hope—before spinning off in a completely nonsensical direction. Would willingly offer a generous donation to make it stop.
Monday, October 29, 2012
10669: Campaign With The Obama SuperPac.
As the presidential election draws near, now is a great time to visit the Obama SuperPac and see how Harry Webber and his friends have progressed. Wonder what they might think of Carl Warner’s crusade.
10668: Conservative Conversation Cont’d.
Another anonymous comment left at the follow-up post to the Carl Warner critique inspired new thinking on the alleged dearth of political conservatives in the advertising industry.
If political conservatives really are minorities on Madison Avenue, could there be legitimate explanations for the phenomenon?
Maybe political conservatives are oblivious to the advertising and marketing opportunities available to them. Although their success at branding candidates and causes—as well as the PR efforts implemented by lobbyists for advertisers like the fast food industry—indicates there is a thorough awareness of the field.
Perhaps political conservatives simply aren’t interested in advertising careers, opting for more lucrative jobs with Wall Street, FOX News or NASCAR pit crews.
Advertising honchos consistently insist candidates are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their portfolios. Abstractly applying the notion to political conservatives, unless one’s samples included “It’s morning again in America” or “It’s Halftime in America,” it’s unlikely that affiliations with the right would ever hinder a hiring decision—or even come up during an interview.
Then again, political conservatives may indeed be facing discrimination on Madison Avenue. The industry has certainly shown a propensity for unfair treatment towards anybody outside of the status quo. So it’s completely possible that adpeople are refusing to acknowledge the Republican elephant in the room.
Yet while illegal and bad behavior is blatantly directed at individuals based on race, ethnicity, gender, lifestyle, religion and age, has anyone witnessed improprieties targeting political conservatives? Can’t think of any lawsuits brought against agencies and holding companies by Tea Party members. And Carl Warner is not a very convincing poster child for the movement, as there’s little evidence that his career has suffered because of his voting record.
Somebody should just ask Mitt Romney to promise to create more advertising jobs for political conservatives if he’s elected president.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
10667: For Coffee Over-Achievers.
Hills Bros. Overdrive has 20 percent more caffeine per cup. Which sorta makes it the malt liquor of coffee.
10666: Gratuitous Use Of Zombies 2.
Here’s another concept that should have been killed—in any number of ways.
10665: Messing With The STARS.
Remember the 2011 Halloween campaign created by STARS—Students Teaching About Racism in Society—at Ohio University? Well, there’s a parody campaign right here.
10664: Polling The Post-Racial Truth.
Majority of Americans harbor prejudice against blacks: poll
A new poll finds that a bare majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.
By The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.
Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some Americans’ more favorable views of blacks.
Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.
In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.
“As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time ... it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey.
Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison.
The AP surveys were conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago.
Experts on race said they were not surprised by the findings.
“We have this false idea that there is uniformity in progress and that things change in one big step. That is not the way history has worked,” said Jelani Cobb, professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. “When we’ve seen progress, we’ve also seen backlash.”
Obama himself has tread cautiously on the subject of race, but many African-Americans have talked openly about perceived antagonism toward them since Obama took office. As evidence, they point to events involving police brutality or cite bumper stickers, cartoons and protest posters that mock the president as a lion or a monkey, or lynch him in effigy.
“Part of it is growing polarization within American society,” said Fredrick Harris, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. “The last Democrat in the White House said we had to have a national discussion about race. There’s been total silence around issues of race with this president. But, as you see, whether there is silence, or an elevation of the discussion of race, you still have polarization. It will take more generations, I suspect, before we eliminate these deep feelings.”
Overall, the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, Obama could lose 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. However, Obama also stands to benefit from a 3 percentage point gain due to pro-black sentiment, researchers said. Overall, that means an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti-black attitudes.
The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. That test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent).
Obama faced a similar situation in 2008, the survey then found.
The Associated Press developed the surveys to measure sensitive racial views in several ways and repeated those studies several times between 2008 and 2012.
The explicit racism measures asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about black and Hispanic people. In addition, the surveys asked how well respondents thought certain words, such as “friendly,” “hardworking,” “violent” and “lazy,” described blacks, whites and Hispanics.
The same respondents were also administered a survey designed to measure implicit racism, in which a photo of a black, Hispanic or white male flashed on the screen before a neutral image of a Chinese character. The respondents were then asked to rate their feelings toward the Chinese character. Previous research has shown that people transfer their feelings about the photo onto the character, allowing researchers to measure racist feelings even if a respondent does not acknowledge them.
Results from those questions were analyzed with poll takers’ ages, partisan beliefs, views on Obama and Romney and other factors, which allowed researchers to predict the likelihood that people would vote for either Obama or Romney. Those models were then used to estimate the net impact of each factor on the candidates’ support.
All the surveys were conducted online. Other research has shown that poll takers are more likely to share unpopular attitudes when they are filling out a survey using a computer rather than speaking with an interviewer. Respondents were randomly selected from a nationally representative panel maintained by GfK Custom Research.
Overall results from each survey have a margin of sampling error of approximately plus or minus 4 percentage points. The most recent poll, measuring anti-black views, was conducted Aug. 30 to Sept. 11.
Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist who studies race-neutrality among black politicians, contrasted the situation to that faced by the first black mayors elected in major U.S. cities, the closest parallel to Obama’s first-black situation. Those mayors, she said, typically won about 20 percent of the white vote in their first races, but when seeking reelection they enjoyed greater white support presumably because “the whites who stayed in the cities ... became more comfortable with a black executive.”
“President Obama’s election clearly didn’t change those who appear to be sort of hard-wired folks with racial resentment,” she said.
Negative racial attitudes can manifest in policy, noted Alan Jenkins, an assistant solicitor general during the Clinton administration and now executive director of the Opportunity Agenda think tank.
“That has very real circumstances in the way people are treated by police, the way kids are treated by teachers, the way home seekers are treated by landlords and real estate agents,” Jenkins said.
Hakeem Jeffries, a New York state assemblyman and candidate for a congressional seat being vacated by a fellow black Democrat, called it troubling that more progress on racial attitudes had not been made. Jeffries has fought a New York City police program of “stop and frisk” that has affected mostly blacks and Latinos but which supporters contend is not racially focused.
“I do remain cautiously optimistic that the future of America bends toward the side of increased racial tolerance,” Jeffries said. “We’ve come a long way, but clearly these results demonstrate there’s a long way to go.”
10663: Overreaction Of The Week.
In Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, the white agency appears to be, well, predominately White.
10662: Ann Coulter—Ugly, Ignorant Moron.
‘Screw them!’ Ann Coulter refuses to apologize to the ‘word police’ for using the ‘R word’ in tweeted Obama insult
Ann Coulter says she is fed up with ‘word police’ and will not apologize for calling President Obama a ‘retard’ — despite criticism from advocates for people with disabilities, including Special Olympian John Franklin Stephens.
By Michael Walsh / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Ann Coulter is unfazed by the onslaught of criticism she received for calling President Obama a “retard.”
The conservative pundit told Alan Colmes of Fox News Radio that the people who denounced her glib usage of the R word were “liberal bullies.”
“Look, no one would refer to a Down’s syndrome child, someone with an actual mental handicap, by saying ‘retard,’” Coulter said.
“Where do you think the words imbecile, idiot, moron, cretin come from?” she asked. “These were all technical terms at one time. Retard has been used colloquially to just mean ‘loser’ for 30 years.”
Liberal commentator Colmes countered that many Americans consider the R word deeply offensive, reported The Washington Times.
But Coulter would not budge.
“Screw them!” she said, “You just cannot go around saying this and that word is offensive. I’m sick of this.”
The controversy arose when Coulter tweeted, “I highly approve of Romney’s decision to be kind and gentle to the retard,” after the most recent presidential debate.
Arguably the most poignant response came from Special Olympian John Franklin Stephens, who penned an open letter asking Coulter to reconsider her word choice.
“You assumed that people would understand and accept that being linked to someone like me is an insult,” he wrote. “Well, Ms. Coulter, you, and society, need to learn that being compared to people like me should be considered a badge of honor.”
Coulter told Colmes that Stephens’ message for her was unnecessary.
“I do not need to be told this,” Coulter said.
But Stephens does not buy Coulter’s argument, as he made clear to Piers Morgan on Friday.
“The word ‘retard’ is offensive and I should not be a symbol for someone who is dumb and shallow. If they wanted to use me as a symbol, use me as a symbol for someone who fights adversity,” Stephens said.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
10661: Republican Party Full Of Racists…?
Lawrence Wilkerson, Former Colin Powell Aide, Blasts Sununu, GOP, As ‘Full Of Racists’
The Huffington Post | By Peter Finocchiaro
Colin Powell’s former chief of staff condemned the Republican Party on Friday night, telling MSNBC’s Ed Schultz, “My party is full of racists.”
Retired Army Col. Lawrence Wilkerson made the comment in response to Mitt Romney campaign surrogate John Sununu’s suggestion on Thursday that Powell’s endorsement of President Barack Obama’s re-election was motivated by race. Wilkerson, who served as Powell’s chief of staff when the general was secretary of state during the first George W. Bush term, told Schultz that he respected Sununu “as a Republican, as a member of my party,” but did not “have any respect for the integrity of the position that [Sununu] seemed to codify.”
When asked by Schultz what, if anything, the remark said about the attitudes of the Republican Party, Wilkerson said:
My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people—not all of them, but most of them—who are still basing their positions on race. Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that’s despicable.
The retired colonel also said that “to say that Colin Powell would endorse President Obama because of his skin color is like saying Mother Theresa worked for profit.”
Powell, a Republican, endorsed Obama for the second time on Thursday morning—he also backed the president in 2008—saying on CBS’ “This Morning” that he was “more comfortable with President Obama and his administration” than with Romney on a host of issues.
Sununu, no stranger to incendiary rhetoric this election cycle, reacted to the endorsement on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight,” saying that “when you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or whether he’s got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama.”
Obama himself dismissed Sununu’s suggestion on Friday, telling radio host Michael Smerconish: ç
Any suggestion that Gen. Powell would make such a profound statement in such an important election based on anything but what he thought was what’s going to be best for America doesn’t make much sense.
10660: Get Christie Mia Love.
Mia Love hopes to be first black Republican woman in Congress
Polling shows Love with a slight lead over Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson, a six-term incumbent. The race is still too close to call.
By The Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY — In her bid to become the first black Republican woman elected to Congress, Mia Love is the GOP’s emblem of diversity this campaign year. She’s reluctant to embrace the role, saying she doesn’t let race or gender define her politics.
The 36-year-old mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, points to her policy stances as the reason for her success.
“I was elected mayor not because of my race or gender, not because I wear high heels, but because of the policies I put in place,” Love said in a recent interview.
Polling shows Love with a slight lead over Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson, a six-term incumbent. The race is still too close to call.
In a party that has struggled for decades to attract black voters, the daughter of Haitian immigrants included subtle nods to civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks in her speech to the Republican National Convention in August.
“Our story has been told for over 200 years with small steps and giant leaps,” she told the applauding delegates. “From a woman on a bus to a man with a dream, from the bravery of the greatest generation to the innovators and entrepreneurs of today, this is our story.”
Love has made much of her family story, a hallmark of her stump speeches: Her parents legally immigrated to Brooklyn in the early 1970s, she says, with just $10 in their pockets. She says her father — who has toiled as a painter, janitor and school bus driver — taught her never to ask for a handout. Her parents became naturalized U.S. citizens in 1984.
A married mother of three, a Mormon and a tea party favorite, Love is the only woman among 11 black Republican House candidates in the Nov. 6 election. She and Vernon Parker, who is running in Arizona, are seen as the most likely winners among nine black GOP challengers.
Republicans, like Love herself, have focused more on her conservative values and agenda than her race.
“We need a party that is diverse based on our issues and not based on simply trying to find greater variety in the complexion,” said Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina, one of the two black Republicans now in the House.
While Love doesn’t emphasize her race and gender, they are powerful factors in her bid to become a Republican member of Congress. Scott and Allen West of Florida were elected in 2010 as the first black Republicans in Congress since former Rep. J.C. Watts of Oklahoma left in 2003.
Black Republicans have long been scarce in Congress. Of 26 black Republican House members since 1870, the vast majority served during the post-Civil War Reconstruction days. Scott and West, both tea party favorites, were swept into office as part of the GOP wave in 2010. West faces a tough re-election fight.
Love is getting support in her bid to focus on policies.
It would be a disservice to Love for Republicans to tout her candidacy in racial terms, said Artur Davis, a black former Democratic congressman from Alabama who switched parties and also spoke to the GOP convention.
“As a congresswoman, she would have so much more to offer: successful former mayor, the product of a successful immigration story and a thoughtful, dynamic conservative,” Davis said.
Amid the nation’s shifting demographics, the GOP has focused more on reaching out to Hispanics than black voters, who have supported President Barack Obama in overwhelming numbers.
To enter the history books, Love must topple Matheson, the son of a popular former governor, in a state where more than nine in 10 people are white. For a decade, a series of white Republican men have been unable to knock off Matheson, a fiscally conservative “Blue Dog” Democrat who has beaten far more recognizable names in Utah politics.
Since the convention, Republican House Speaker John Boehner, Arizona Sen. John McCain and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have helped Love raise money. Mitt Romney’s son Josh is her campaign chairman.
10659: Conservative Cluelessness…?
Anonymous comments left at the Carl Warner post insist there is an anti-Republican bias at work in the advertising industry.
The person claims that in the past decade, “I can think of maybe six, tops, people I’ve encountered through the years who were professed conservatives. … I’ve been in two creative sessions at two separate, unrelated agencies in the last few weeks where the entire room spent their downtime bashing Republicans and professing their own hipper, more liberal street cred. … Again, spent downtime, break time, stopping work to snack and eat and at the same time discuss how Republicans are bad and horrible because of XYZ and Democrats are so much better and more open-minded because of ABC.”
Gee, the words almost mirror the trials and tribulations experienced by racial and ethnic minorities in the business. It’s easy to imagine dialogue such as, “I can think of maybe six, tops, people I’ve encountered through the years who were Black. … I’ve been in two creative sessions at two separate, unrelated agencies in the last few weeks where the entire room spent their downtime bashing Blacks. … Again, spent downtime, break time, stopping work to snack and eat and at the same time discuss how Blacks are bad and horrible because of XYZ and Whites are so much better and more open-minded because of ABC.”
Yet it all begs the question: Is there a dearth of political conservatism on Madison Avenue?
In 1963, The Journal of Higher Education published “The Right to Fail: Creativity versus Conservatism” by Albert J. Sullivan. In the essay, Sullivan spotlighted the tension between two processes—creativity and conservatism—pulling in different directions. The author wrote, “The one process, toward change, we may characterize as creativity; the other process, resisting change, as conservatism.”
Sullivan’s observations certainly apply to the advertising industry, where writers and art directors (representing creativity) routinely square off with account people (representing conservatism). And conservative creative people are often deemed losers, while creative account people are deemed annoying losers.
Generational components could also be at play. Winston Churchill is quoted as having said something along the lines of, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.” No need to delve deeper on the implications here, except to note that adpeople have been known to make decisions on work with an eye towards having to pay mortgages and meet other financial obligations associated with life stages.
The items above sorta fly in the face of the contention that conservatives are minorities within advertising agencies. Indeed, they appear to be well represented in our ranks. And if the notion is further elevated to politics—specifically, Democrats and Republicans—it stands to reason that the parties are adequately represented too. Granted, Republican creative directors and Democratic account directors might be oddballs, but it’s a safe bet they exist as well.
In the event that anti-Republicanism is a problem on Madison Avenue, look forward to activists taking action. High schools and colleges will be scoured for young GOP and Tea Party enthusiasts. Political intern programs will be launched. The One Club will introduce “Where Are All The Republicans?” Kat Gordon will invent the “1% Conference” to salute the One Percent among us. And ADCOLOR® will award a special trophy to Black Republicans.
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