AgencySpy posted on the General Mills pitch that features diversity requests for the competing White advertising agencies. The blog post included:
According to our sources, the five invited to the closed review were Mother New York, McCann New York, Deutsch, 72andSunny and a Publicis conglomerate represented by Fallon, whose former CSO Michael Fanuele is now GM’s creative chief.
Okey-doke. Hopefully, General Mills has viewed the Mother wall, demanded the truth from McCann, accounted for the investments at Deutsch, checked the 72andSunny forecast and looked up the definition of cronyism. And while they’re at it, General Mills should look up the definition of hypocrisy too.
Mother is a mostly white agency that slaps black and brown talent in front of the camera, and adds Latinx music and hip hop here and there, and masquerades as having multicultural expertise. As long as General Mills doesn't dig deeply, they'll seem diverse on the surface.
ReplyDeleteMcCann has their Hispanic ad agency that they toss crumbs at now and then, and allows to do translations (while reserving all the heavy and original creative lifting for themselves), staffed almost entirely with visa holders. So if General Mills wants foreign people of color rather than minorities in America that know American minorities, content to take a back seat and copywrite a line or two here and there at most, they'll be fine.
Deutsch just had at least some of their ethnic employees quite in the last few because they were sick of a diet of crumbs, so if General Mills looked at them BEFORE the ethnic walkout, they'll be in the running. Even if their creative "multicultural" work is mostly white creatives and white women putting black and brown talent in front of the camera, or adding hip hop music, or translating something into Spanish.
72 and Sunny has one kind of minority, and it's Exotic Foreigners. If General Mills wants elite overseas hires on visas that don't know or care about multicultural audiences, but are strong on LGBTQ advertising, they'll be fine.
Publicis Conglomerate is a Frankenstein mash of anyone with a vaguely ethnic name from overseas offices, and whatever few minorities they had here in America scattered between agencies hastily thrown together, and then all the usual white men and women that do all the actual calling of the shots. If General Mills wants a team that's going to fall apart sooner or later, this is it.
In other words, General Mills is going to get the same stray crumbs they fed to the ethnic markets all these years.