Having spent over two decades in advertising creating and producing ads, I can tell you when you see a racially offensive ad, what you may think of as straight-out racism is often the unintentional collaboration of “me too” environment of culturally narrow perspectives. People who don’t know people beyond their own culture and lifestyle at any deep level bouncing ideas off similar people around them (who also don’t know). The equilivent of virgins who might have kissed once talking about sex positions. Advertising has changed a lot, but for certain cultural understanding, clearly not enough. Something that’s even more critical today as the face of America is getting darker and culturally diverse.

Don’t get me wrong. We have made some changes. Even in the last 60 years when the TV show Mad Men starts to now, the US advertising business has moved from a world of just white men to a culturally diverse world of white men and women. Positive change, but still an echo-chamber of suburban, mostly white people trying to talk about and to other ethnic groups with a surface level understanding of any culture and history outside their own. BTW, this is not a hate-whitey speech, just saying as hiring stats have show: the the advertising culture is culturally monolithic. Hip, but “white” hip.

Fearful to wade too deep in a different culture they don’t understand any farther beyond the ethnic people they see at work, ad people often try creating ads with the expression of ethnic differences within the realm they themselves are comfortable with. Often for ad people, that cultural knowledge comes from the only other place we run into diversity: media. What we see on TV. Hear on the radio. It’s one reason why for a while you see black stereotypes, of black people dancing, wearing hats backwards, beat-box voice rappers in ads. Rather than immerse ourselves physically in others’ culture, we often instead rely on media to collect shallow touch points with other cultures. It’s pop culture eating itself. Touch points that, in turn, ad people lazily use to define a whole culture. It would be like a black person defining all white people by what they heard on NPR -because they’ve seen a lot of white people listening to it.

It’s a cursory understanding that causes many of these perceived “racist” incidents to happen because the ads makers simply can’t see the cultural land mines just a little further below the surface of the shallow, visual cues they are co-opting.

Why can’t some people see these land mines? Often the same people ease their uncomfortableness dealing with ethnic and cultural differences by enacting a self-congratulating form of color blindness disguised as moral high ground-how things should be. An idea that they’ll create an ad as if they don’t see any color. No differences. That people are one and the same.

Problem is, the key word in colorblind is being BLIND. A true marketer is not. The job of marketing is to see and understand your audience. Targeting an audience is discriminating (in the dictionary sense of the world: to discern difference between things) To see and market to audiences with an understanding of their differences.

To not do so is arrogant form of advertising. One where the agency or advertiser market personal ideology of consumer identity as we think it should be to the market. And not market to the customer’s true identity, hopes and aspirations as they see them. And those that forget that, will arrogantly end up offending their audience rather than selling to them. That’s how ads that come to be called racist happen.

Some of you may call the ethnic slips ups of a marketing fit racism. It’s not. To be racist, you have to have intent to demean or keep down. Ignorance doesn’t have intent. A bit like being drunk, if offends because it’s arrogantly blind to the consequences of its own actions.

Deep down ad agencies know insight and discrimination (we call it segmentation) is key to marketing to any group. When an agency gets a new car account or a pharma account, they look to hire people with car or pharma experience. They, especially pharma, would likely look at you funny if you said “we don’t need people with pharma experience. Our current team that works on Vicks Vapor Rub can handle this.” They and likely their pharma client would disagree. Pharma people know there are unique issues that pharma must deal with that aren’t like the general market. Regulations. Understanding of medical communities. For a firm to impose an ideology that pharma should be and act like any other market, would be a collision course to problems.

Or if a black copywriter asked a white college what a white slang term means (the opposite happens a lot) agency executives might feel uncomfortable having you work on certain accounts or even near clients.

This is not to say whites can work on minority marketing and vice versa. Quite the contrary. Eminem is probably one of the best rappers of all time. But Emimem has the resume. He really took the time to know the culture of rap so he could speak from the heart and from a wannabe  “Rap for Dummies” book. Or not  simply dress up for the part. It’s what gave his songs credibility in the music community. Not that he sings it, but he gets it.

Take that as a lesson. For minority marketing it just means that you do have to recognize there are differences that go just beyond words and work to those differences to create messages that our more tailored to the target’s need and experience. That’s what true marketing is all about. And that’s why discrimination is minority marketing is good. And we should  do more.

And something all agencies need to really take heart. Because according to the demographics foreshadowing the rise of Hispanics and Asians, we’re all going to be in the ethnic marketing business really soon.