Dove ad casts spotlight on Madison Avenue racism
Supposedly an attempt to present Dove as a company that values cultural diversity, many believe that the ad fell astoundingly short...
When people ask Eugene Morris why he left a virtually all-white advertising firm in the early 1970s for an African-American one, he tells them about the time he asked a white higher-up for an overdue raise.
“He started telling me about how well-dressed I was,” Morris recalled. “He told me that I had a nice sports car, which I did, and he told me that he knew that I had a very nice apartment. He started naming all these things, these possessions of mine, and he said, ‘Aren’t you making enough money?’ I thought the next thing he was going to say was, ‘Well what more would a ‘mmmm’ want?’”
Incidents like these added up, Morris said, and after a while he decided he’d had enough, as did many other young black executives who left the advertising world after an initial surge of racially progressive hiring in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Morris cited this incident recently to illustrate one of the reasons why the racial make-up of the mainstream advertising business still looks much as it did in the early ‘70s, which is to say, predominantly white.
“When I first came into the business, if I had projected forty years into the future,” said Marshall, “I never would have described the current situation, where African-Americans are still in the single digits in all these agencies.”
For all too obvious reasons, the dearth of black executives in advertising doesn’t normally receive much attention from the mainstream media, but a controversial Dove body wash ad cast the issue into the spotlight this week. Supposedly an attempt to present Dove as a company that values cultural diversity, many believe that the ad fell astoundingly short.
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