At Adweek, Patrick Coffee wrote “How Growing Brands Can Avoid Shea Moisture’s Mistake of Alienating Core Fans.” Um, is the doofus who works as the head poster at AgencySpy really qualified to counsel brands? After all, AgencySpy ultimately alienated its core fans by bringing Coffee on board. Regardless, the lengthy piece only offers two points worth noting:
1. Adweek revealed, “In an effort to increase its market share, the brand hired Droga5 as its creative agency of record.” While the White advertising agency had nothing to do with the Shea moisture video sparking online outrage, the hiring shows that the hair care company is culturally clueless and has clearly lost touch with its customer base.
2. Adweek wrote, “A spokesperson for VaynerMedia did not respond to a request for comment…” Okay, VaynerMedia is a White digital shop run by Gary Vaynerchuk, an alleged social media guru—which underscores how social media is anti-social to minorities.
Time to put Agency Spy out of its misery. It's pathetic now. Coffee is an insufferable self-hating white guy who judges creative on its political correctness, not whether it's good or sells things. Adweak and Agency Spy have lost their way, like the ad industry overall.
ReplyDeleteYeah but if you look close Agency Spy's comments section was one of the few places the few people of color working in the industry could speak up about the issues of racism. That's gone now. What's left? Speaking up in real life backfires on POC every time and they get shut out of the business as a result.
ReplyDeleteI'd have loved to have seen a conversation in the comments section on the Shea Moisture issue, but it's just radio silence over there now.
I don't get how mostly, if not entirely, white agency teams (Pepsi with their in house one, Taco Bell with Deutsch, Shea Moisture with Vayner) can keep dropping the ball like this and nobody in the ad community dares talk about how race (or lack thereof in decision making roles) contributed to it.
ReplyDeleteIt's like everyone's blindly ignoring it, when it's the root cause of it all.