“Hey Everyone, thanks for coming to our brainstorming session.”
“I know we said this would be a free flow of ideas, but don’t worry, I’ve already got it in the bag.”
“Put your hand down Samantha.”
“Here’s the pitch: young people, very youthful, very colorful, all of them…wait for it (pushes brim of glasses)….dancing.”
Is this how I think conversations at ad agencies go?
Not word for word.
But I can’t understand the lack of creativity of creative directors as anything less than a sort of cultural blindness.
Is it possible ad agencies pitch several ideas and their clients chose, time and again, the “dancing people of color” option?
Based on my experience in the ad world which consists solely of watching 6.5 seasons of Mad Men, I would say, yes.
Tommy Hilfiger 2020 Instagram post
Never go full Pitbull.
That would still mean the “dancing people of color” option was an option, thought of, and proposed to the client, by the ad agency.
Even when the ad features a very famous young artist who is a person of color, we must add dancing.
Even when their song was the biggest hit song of all-time.
To see one idea, repeated so many times, leads me to think the creators don’t have other ideas.
Which means they haven’t thought about the subject beyond their first approach.
Or worse, maybe they have, and concluded their first approach was the correct one.
I’m fascinated by advertisements because they’re such a snapshot of the moment.
And the wording is often so blatant, so blunt, that it becomes a characiture of itself: insulting the very people it aims to appeal to.
Want to sell trucks to white men?
Better talk about being tough, and working hard, and carrying heavy stuff.
Wanna sell phones?
You’d think there would be a lot of ways to do that. And there are…
For white people.
Iphones
Here’s a collection of iphone ads from 2007 to 2017.
They contain, in their entirety, not one dancing white person.
At the 1 minute mark there is an ad where a young white woman who identifies herself as a BALLERINA DANCER talks to the camera about – I swear to god – her dance blog.
She talks about dancing for 30 seconds.
We even see her scroll past a thumbnail of a video that SHOWS A BALLERINA STRETCHING: “putting their point shoes on”, we’re told.
Told, not shown.
White women don’t dance, they blog about dancing, and if they do dance, it’s as a ballerina and we definitely don’t watch them do it.
Here is Apple’s Iphone 7 ad from 2017.
Dancing, no white people.
I’ll just leave these observations – from the 20 minute iphone-athon – here:
- We see a black father and son talk via facetime about being new father’s and grandfathers. Not every commercial featuring people of color advertising to people of color involves dancing. But it is interesting that we don’t see the young man’s face in the Facetime ad, only the older father’s.
- Venus and Serena Williams…playing table tennis.
- A black man, briefly, filming his assumed daughter doing gymnastics.
- A montage of diverse people doing diverse things. Many of the people with the darkest skin are: in a gym locker room, hands near a turntable, kids in hoodies in an…alley?, and, to be fair, cosplaying as a Klingon.
The most beautiful of these ads is “Balloons” (16:06 mark).
In the ad, we float along, following the flight of a single balloon as more and more balloons join its journey.
We fly over fields, highways, through city skylines.
It’s all very “Two” by The Antlers: hypnotic and delicate.
That is, until the very last shot.
At that end of the ad we see a young black woman receive a text as balloons flood her skyrise apartment, sorrounding her.
All good.
And then the tagline…”practically magic”.
In the cinema of the United States, the Magical Negro is a supportingstock character who comes to the aid of whiteprotagonists in a film.[1] Magical Negro characters, who often possess special insight or mystical powers, have long been a tradition in American fiction.[2]
Wiki
Practically Magic
White supremacy isn’t just supporting neo-nazis, it is also a lack of examination about the assumptions our society and organizations are built upon.
Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same
Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, 2001
time so very difficult to name or identify.
Culture blinds us to the things we are blind to: the “unknown unknown” means not only can we not see what is in our blind spot, we think we don’t have one.
When you are part of a ruling class, the danger of your blindness – the unexamined biases you didn’t know you needed to examine – is the physical and economic damage it does to those who live in your blind spots.
But there is a damaging done to the white mind by a culture that puts it on a pedestal: lack of imagination being one such side effect.
Truly changed its direction from the more subdued Keegan Michael-Key “drink want you truly want” approach to this, in 2020.
How many people along the way agreed with the premises of these videos?
Who couldn’t put it into words but got really excited by the idea?
Who thought it just “made sense”?
How many disagreed but didn’t feel they could speak up?
How many knew exactly what they were doing?
Who came up with the tagline “practically magic”?
Was it written to have a black woman cast?
Or, was that a last minute decision that just “seemed to fit”?
Do these videos pay young people of color? They do.
Do they employ people of color behind the scenes? I hope so.
Do they often involve sweet dance moves? Often, they do.
They are often beautiful creations. The Iphone 7 ad: dancing on the walls, is dope.
But they are beautiful creations that completely lack creativity, even though they are literally using creativity as a premise: dance one of humankind’s first arts.
Like a blond Fox News anchor, the beauty of these ads is integral to their danger.
On the final episode of the podcast The Scaredy Cats Horror Show, playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins relates the theatrical ending of Get Out, as opposed to the alternate ending where our protagonist (spoiler alert kind of) ends up in jail, to pitches he received for television shows.
Speaking of a lack of creativity, I’ll end with his words.
I think the ending they chose is the right ending because…genres are about…unifying the people who can share the same moral codes or signs of that genre, and horror films are explicitly moralizing…because it’s life and death”.
I think this is an amazing example of the differences between those two endings because…in that one ending where he winds up in jail…we’re still positing that our hero has to live outside a moral code or suffer beneath one.
What I love in this version, it’s “no, actually, they all possess the moral code”, everyone can be a part of it.
This is a horrible thing that happened but there’s a way out of it that doesn’t have to end with like, black people incarcerated or dead.
Like, justice can happen still.
For 3 years of my sad little TV career I kept getting pitched the same thing, which was literally like, “ok, we have a pitch for you, um, it’s a world in which reparations happen and it’s insane. People are dead, they want to murder eachother, it’s like a nightmare, black people are rounded up, they’re living in cages.”
Can you write that?
I have to say to people, what if there’s a show where reparations happen and it’s…ok?
Episode #5, The Scaredy Cats Horror Show
Oh, and they made that TV show – the one about reparations happening and everything going to hell: 2019’s critically celebrated (by who?) Watchmen.