“IS THE WHITE MAN’S ICE STILL COLDER?”:
WHY BLACK AGENCIES IGNORE BLACK CLIENTS
BY: HADJI WILLIAMS
Attention Advertising Agencies, PR firms and brand consultants. I have a proposition for you:
“A US company with nearly a billion dollars in annual revenues needs your help. They have diversified holdings, strong relationships, quality products and services plus a great CEO and strong management team. But for all their financial success to date, they lack a recognizable brand. Consumers love their products and services but don’t really link either to their company; so they need help building a brand that will solidify their relationships with their core consumer while helping them expand into new markets. Think you can help? If so gimme a call.”
That’s the pitch I made to several major agencies about 3 years ago after meeting “LC”, the founder/CEO of one of the largest black-owned companies in the US. As a favor to LC, I approached several ad agencies. They initially salivated at the numbers I laid out. They were impressed by the categories LC’s company was in. But one by one, they all stuttered and bailed when I mentioned that LC was black and they’d be taking on a culturally diverse yet largely black-run company.
“You see, we’d have to make sure a company like that is a good fit with out capabilities,” was how one agency VP put it to me. Another said only, “Oh, well… Uh, I’ll have to keep him in mind—maybe we’ll look into it.”
I couldn’t believe it. I’d talked to decision-makers at 6 different agencies on both coasts. And once I said, “black CEO” or “black-owned company” everyone at every agency lost interest and tuned me out. The $800 million in revenues, the chance to build a brand for an established yet still-rising company wasn’t enough. Agency folks didn’t even want LC’s email address for their files much less an intro.
I was so flabbergasted I simply gave up contacting shops. After all, LC’s on his way to being a billion-dollar company by 2010, fancy ad campaigns and PR or not. But the fact that shop after shop chose to turn down this opportunity for no real reason—in this crazy economic climate—left me floored. It also left me wondering why LC wasn’t the only guy I knew who was in this situation.
I’ve met numerous ethnic business-owners over the years—some of LC’s stature, most much smaller—who’ve told me of similar problems dealing with ad agencies. Almost to a person, they’ve said that agencies simply aren’t interested in taking them on. “We’re just not seen as ‘real clients’,” one CEO told me. So the result is that many black-owned companies end up shifting their advertising and marketing budgets in-house or farming them out to lesser-qualified, less capable freelancers who are at least willing to try. (Something’s better than nothing, right?)
My gramma used to say that, “they act like the white man’s ice is colder.” It was black southern slang for the misguided belief that white businesses were inherently better just because the owners/CEO/majority patrons were white. Well, I’ve seen quite a bit of this in the ad world. Small white-owned companies get called “boutiques” and “up and coming” or “niche” while Black/Hispanic-owned companies are frequently viewed as “small,” “unproven” or “risky”. Such is the impact of branding.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are over 1.4 million Black-owned businesses; that’s a 45% increase since 1997; and they’re generating nearly $90 billion in revenue, a 25% increase. Sounds impressive, huh? Granted, a good 85% of these businesses are single-proprietor with small revenues. But that still leaves literally tens of thousands more businesses with significant revenues and potentially lucrative marketing/ad budgets going untapped. That’s more than enough to “guap” to free ethnic shops from the shackles of all those mainstream-driven 51/49 chains, which is whole other column all together.
And where’s Madison Ave on this opportunity? I mean, a client’s a client, right?
Well, given that GM clients allocate 95% of their budgets to GM shops based on little more than skin color, these agencies are comfortable focusing on white-owned/mainstream-run companies where their bread gets buttered most. Besides, if GM shops took on ethnic clients, would that mean that ethnic shops would get an equal shot at anglo-/mainstream owned clients? Hmmm…
As for the Black ad agencies/ethnic marketing firms? Well, the ones that aren’t stupidly waiting on table scraps from the pathetically miniscule multicultural budgets they get from GM clients seem content to play Ahab and chase after mythical great white whales at the expense of the fish in their own pond. Or as my gramma might say:
Ice Fishing.
