Technically, this is not a BHM advertisement; rather, it’s another example of self-promotional pap tied to the EBONY Power 100, this time from Comcast NBCUniversal. Congratulating its VP of Inclusion & Multicultural Marketing, the company proclaimed, “Leaders Drive Innovation.” Okay, but the advertisement is anything but innovative.
These BHM ads get created in only a couple of ways.
ReplyDeleteFirst is the ethnic magazine gets a big brand to cough up money in exchange for them naming someone in that brand as a "Trailblazer" or "Champion" or some other BS title that they usually didn't earn, or earned by doing the bare minimum.
Yay, now the magazine gets ad $$$ in exchange, brand gets to say they are Diversity Supporters, so it's a win-win. But who designs the ad?
Either an intern, or in-house junior designer inside the brand half asses it, or the magazine itself does the bare minimum to design the ad. Either way it's not going to win any awards, because it was never about advertising. It was about getting the brand to pay money to the magazine.
Sometimes, the brand gets its ad agency to design the ad for a handful of change or pro-bono (guilted into doing it because they're the AOR after all). In that case, it's not like the AOR puts its best and brightest on the job. They also punt it to an intern or junior designer.
End result is you usually end up with an ethnic intern or low level designer who "gets" to have a BHM ad as a part of their portfolio, which white female recruiters then ask them to remove from their books anyway when applying to a new job, because the work is too ethnic specific and never any good.
The end.