The streets of New York were crowded with protesters when Shantell Martin received an email from an advertising agency last month.
M: United, a company owned by global advertising company McCann, wanted to know if Mrs. Martin, a black artist, would be interested in creating a mural about the Black Lives Matter movement in the Fifth Avenue storefront. And could it, the email said, “while the protests are still relevant and the panels still stand, ideally no later than next Sunday?”
Several other black artists received the same email. In an open letter to Microsoft and McCann, Martin and the other artists described the invitation as “shocking and somewhat predictable.” They also wrote that “a revealing and dangerous opportunism betrays.”
“In their rush to portray public solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, companies risk rewriting what brought us all here: the instrumentalization and exploitation of black work, ideas and talent for what in Ultimately it is their own benefit and safety, “the group wrote.
Efforts by major companies to publicly support protests against racism and police brutality have been empty for some black workers in creative fields.
Artists, models, designers, copywriters and others said they had been drafted to give legitimacy to companies that fail to comply with the principles of diversity and inclusion. They said they had been pigeonholed for advertising campaign roles or penalized when they objected to the efforts they deemed callous, and that they had been underpaid or had not been given adequate credit for their work.
After Ms. Martin posted on Instagram on June 6 about the mural’s request, several McCann employees told her that the ad agency had contacted her and other artists despite some internal objections to how it was handled. the project said in an interview. Both Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, and Harris Diamond, McCann’s chief executive, publicly apologized to Ms. Martin on Twitter.
The language used in the email to Ms. Martin “was completely incorrect,” Diamond wrote. Microsoft said in a statement that the message was “an unacceptable error” and that the company assumed “full responsibility.”
A group of marketers, Lexie Pérez, Julian Cole, Stephanie Vitacca, and Davis Ballard, began tracing the avalanche of the company’s solidarity statements in an open Google Slides document they released on June 5. They noted that companies often seemed to “seek participation trophies” and trivialize the Black Lives Matter movement with “empty and vague topics”, without providing concrete plans for change and ignoring complaints of inequality internally.
“This is the current topic of the day,” said Sonya Grier, a professor of marketing at American University. “It has become almost standard for companies to participate, because everyone expects them to have some kind of social presence that explains how they align in the race.”
The so-called art of protest has appeared on the doors and windows of exclusive brands like Free People, 7 For All Mankind and Hugo Boss. Dozens of companies participated in #BlackoutTuesday on Instagram last month, posting black boxes in their feeds with captions that expressed their solidarity with the movement.
But consumers are becoming increasingly sensitive to how companies express their positions. Twenty percent of American adults surveyed at the end of June said they would stop buying from a company that considered itself hypocritical on the issues of police violence and racial injustice, the Opinium survey and market research survey said last week.
After publishing giant Condé Nast and website Refinery29 publicly endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement, they faced allegations of mistreatment of employees of color. Leaked grooming guidelines for Australian fashion brand Zimmerman’s store employees, who recently denounced racism and quoted Archbishop Desmond Tutu on their Instagram account, were found to discriminate against black women who use their hair naturally.
In a statement, Zimmerman said he condemned racism and was “determined to be part of a significant and positive change in the global fashion industry.”
Ifeoma Ozoma, a former manager of the Pinterest image sharing web service, said on Twitter that she and another black woman had recently left the company after being subjected to racist and sexist behavior. That behavior included negative comments from a manager after Ms. Ozoma rejected promoting plantation weddings on the platform, she said.
The company said in a statement it planned to diversify its board and commission an external review of employee pay.
Many creative workers are self-employed and are not protected by human resources departments or represented in corporate surveys. Many freelance black artists, such as Ms. Martin, said they were frequently asked to give their opinion on diversity initiatives, but were not compensated as consultants.
Last month, the fashion designer Dionne Clouser saw a design from her brand Dionne by T replicated on the Instagram account of fast fashion brand Pretty Little Thing. She had seen her work loaned without credit before, but this time, the theft seemed especially blatant. Just a few months earlier, Clouser said she had turned down an offer to be an ambassador for the Pretty Little Thing brand.
But as the owner of a small company with limited funds, she chose not to take over the much larger company in court. Pretty Little Thing declined to comment.
“I’ve gotten used to it, but it leaves me in bad taste,” Clouser said.
Lydia Okello, an influential black queer who uses the pronouns them and them, said they also felt helpless against the big fashion companies. Mx. Okello received an offer from Anthropologie for a free bundle if they posted content on Instagram and provided various images to the company for a social media campaign linked to Pride month. Mx. Okello responded with her standard rates, but said the producer who had approached on several occasions evaded her request for payment, a treatment they did not believe would have been experienced by a direct and influential target.
URBN, the company that owns Anthropologie, said in a statement that it “mishandled our opening to Lydia.” The company said it was evaluating how to make future interactions with influencers more transparent and respectful while clarifying compensation guidelines.
“I have worked as a black creative my entire adult life, and I have come to realize that there is often an assumption that you should be flattered that this great company is approaching you, that it has noticed you, and that reflects a greater cultural narrative that the creative work of marginalized groups is less valuable ”, Mx. Okello said. “It’s like, ‘Shut up and take it, or we’ll find someone else.'”
What exacerbates the problem is the lack of diversity in leadership roles in the industry. Advertising agencies and marketing executives from companies like General Motors, McDonald’s and Walmart pledged in a public letter to address the problem.
But the messages of solidarity, while encouraging, “sound hollow in the face of our everyday experiences,” according to a letter signed by hundreds of Black’s advertising staff in June.
“There are extremely limited people of color in positions of authority at the same time that the market itself is becoming much more diverse,” said Judy Foster Davis, a marketing professor at Eastern Michigan University, who has studied the troubled history of brands. as Aunt Jemima “Then in the last few years, you see all kinds of marketing mistakes.”
Recent gaffes have included racist ads and images from Volkswagen, Dove, and H&M.
Saturday Morning, a racial justice-focused creative collective, which has worked with companies like Procter & Gamble and Spotify, issued a call last month for brands to “take bold steps.”
“In order for us to find true equality, there must be sacrifice and not just sympathy,” said the group of advertising executives Black behind Saturday Morning. “Otherwise this moment will fade like so many before.”
Elizabeth Paton contributed reporting.
