Adweek revealed the secret identities of the White advertising agencies battling in the closed competition for the Subway business. According to Adweek:
It turns out Subway has been quietly talking to agencies for a while now, and the chain already has four finalists for its creative account.Longtime incumbent MMB is defending against three other shops, which sources identified as BBDO, The Martin Agency and McCann Erickson. The brand spent more than $530 million in media last year, according to Kantar Media.
The search is being led by former marketing leader Chris Carroll, who returned to the fold more than a month ago in a senior role. Joanne Davis Consulting in New York is managing the process.
Great. Four White advertising agencies are wooing a recycled White man in a pitch being conducted by a White woman’s search firm—all for a (literally and figuratively) White-bread account. Now that’s diversity at work!
MMB has a division that’s supposedly Hispanic, that they used to lure in clients like Subway, but its just in name only. MMB snagged a bunch of work that was originally with US Hispanic ad agencies (who by the way never got any $$ from Subway to begin with), and a ton of Latin@ ad professionals who were already eating crumbs, lost their jobs in the process.
ReplyDeleteDid MMB hire any of them? No. They continued to use all their same white employees and vendors. Like a blizzard of white people. They just used a couple of bilingual freelance copywriters to translate white commercials and ads into Spanish for a fistful of dollars or so each job.
The result is a ton of Hispanic work from MMB that’s superficially brown on top, lily white underneath. When they’ve done broadcast work, a bunch of the actors can’t even speak Spanish correctly and no one at MMB even noticed. Much less their clients, everyone is white there too. But you can always tell it’s an MMB ad if you’re a Spanish speaker because there’s some Italian looking actor mouthing bad Spanish phonetically.
Karma’s a bitch if they lose Subway.