This print ad from McCann Canada touts the agency’s alleged multicultural expertise. Um, it actually shows the shop is capable of producing minority-targeted advertising that’s just as awful as most minority-targeted advertising. According to the agency website, there’s an in-house team that handles multicultural marketing. The team members probably double as receptionists, administrative assistants, security, janitorial associates, mailroom attendants and chief diversity officers. Based on the people section of the website, there’s not a lot of diversity in Ô Canada—or Ô McCannada.
Their “professional and knowledgeable in-house team” is comprised of people who speak Asian languages but not Filipino (one of the largest ethnic groups), and not a single mention of First Nations (indigenous) culture in Canada (the other major ethnic group), which tells you how serious about multicultural marketing they are.
ReplyDeleteThey’re not.
They have one single woman who speaks multiple languages acting as a front, no full-time team in place, and they scramble to assemble a tossed together collection of random people on foreign visas culled from other parts of the agency whenever (god forbid) it seems like a specialized ethnic agency might be in danger of getting more than a few crumbs.
In other words, it’s exactly the same as in the rest of the General Market agencies. There’s a paper thin verbal commitment to diversity, but nothing to back it up.