Well, it’s been a long wait. Over two weeks to be exact and I’m still waiting by the phone awaiting a call from either Margo Georgiadis, CEO of Ancestry, or senior VP of U.S. Marketing Caroline Sheu…or both. Perhaps it will be a conference call, who knows? So, why should these two industry leaders ring up the independent Media Guy consultant? Well, have you seen their tone-deaf phone “Inseparable” commercial that lit up the airwaves back in April?

Set in the Antebellum South, a foggy pre-dawn scene shows an out-of-breath white man offering a wedding ring and a promise to flee to the North to his love interest, a (presumably enslaved) black woman:

“Abigail,” he says. “We can escape, to the North. There’s a place we can be together, across the border. Will you leave with me?”

But, before I prattle on about how the advertising vision of the Media Guy would have saved the genealogy company millions of dollars in bad will and publicity, let’s watch the spot together:

I understand at the ad was most likely intended to be a romantic adaptation of how someone taking a DNA test ends up with muddle of geographic origins in their heritage. But it wound up as an discomforting blunder when critics correctly pointed out that the “forbidden love” plot was a story gone wrong because the pre-Civil War Deep South was largely defined by the ruthless sexual exploitation of black slave women by white slave owners. All of this brought disdain from the community at large.

With an IPO looming for the genealogical website, this mistake could have been costly. Ancestry quickly pulled the spot and apologized profusely. In a statement, the company told WIRED,  “Ancestry is committed to telling important stories from history,” the company said. “This ad was intended to represent one of those stories. We very much appreciate the feedback we have received and apologize for any offense that the ad may have caused.”

I have to say that this tightly worded apology—mostly likely crafted by Sheu—is a ton better than I would have written. Her experience at GAP, Inc. and her B.A. in Political Science and in East Asian Studies from UCLA, an M.A. in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley, and a J.D./M.B.A. from University of Chicago pales my degrees from UCLA for sure. But with “20 years of experience transforming marketing organizations to adapt to rapidly changing consumer and technology trends” you would figure that Ancestry would have never gotten into this mess to begin with.

A little vision (and a one-hour consulting session with the Media Guy) would have revealed so much just by me looking at the storyboards.

Oh, where to start?

Let’s start with this litany of historical and cultural offenses shoehorned into the 30-second commercial:

• The notion that a white male protector could only liberate a black woman from slavery…
• That most mixed-race people in America today descend from tender, consenting relationships when the biggest historical reason is actually rape…
• Prior to 1861, it was legally impossible for slave women to file rape charges against a white man in Southern U.S. states, 
• That interracial relationship was even possible in this time and this place given the extreme power irregularities of the institution. And finally…
• That there was a promised land of equal opportunity in the “North.” (Breaking News: it wasn’t even close.)

Wow, that’s a lot of errors in thirty seconds. I mean, clearly there were no history books allowed at these final planning sessions prior to their commercial shoot. But, hey, Ancestry was spinning some fairy tale that by filling up a small vial with your saliva that they can miraculously fill in the family tree branches that were severed by the transatlantic slave trade. Oh jeez.

They say when you are so close to a project or a situation, you can’t see the forest among the trees and in this case, that idiom definitely applies. Some extra eyes from the outside would have identified all of this troubling content before filming began. What a waste of filming days and post production and that’s not to mention the damage that could have leveled at their impending IPO.

As a descendant of Russian immigrants from the 1880’s due to the state-sanctioned policies of Alexander III, trust me when I say that tracing family ties aren’t so straightforward. Names were often changed to escape persecution and in the pre-Civil War Era, names of slaves were altered when they were sold to new owners. When you are doing a deep dive on your family history, the process of doing so unearths up painful truths you weren’t expecting.

Reaching out to a diverse audience is important for Ancestry because their DNA database are overwhelmingly white. They tell a much hazier origin story for African Americans. I’m told that Ancestry can divide the 32,000-square-mile island of Ireland into 85 distinct genetic populations. For all of Africa, the company can only carve out nine. Recruiting a more diverse customer base would certainly help lift some of those limitations, and that’s how this commercial came into play however it came off.

So here’s my message to Margo Georgiadis and Caroline Sheu. I called you both and left messages. Two weeks have passed and I’m beginning to think you won’t call me back, but you should and I’ll answer 24/7, 365 days a year. My fees are small and a few hours along with a business class airline ticket will get you and in-person meeting and I’ll save you the hassles of another misfire in the advertising arena. I have the midas touch wherever I go. Once upon a time I made falling in your home a cottage industry and convinced the New York Times that Syria was a top 10 destination.

Do yourselves a favor, don’t say for a second time, “We should have called the Media Guy!” I’ll be waiting with my out special set of media skills. This latest commercial shows that companies like Ancestry still need to prove they can be trusted with their media buys.

Previous “You Should Have Called the Media Guy” Columns:

Hong Kong Tourism Board
Burger King
H&M
The American Red Cross
Pepsi
Kellogg’s
Anaheim Ducks
T-Mobile, Dove, McDonald’s

The post ANCESTRY.COM: You Should Have Called The Media Guy! appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

I’m on phone watch hoping Karl-Johan Persson, the CEO and president of Hennes & Mauritz, aka H&M, stops monkeying around and dials me up so we can discuss their ridiculous Monkey hoodie and subsequent lame apology. Maybe before I rant and rave and tell you how a simple pre-release phone call to the Media Guy can save companies millions of dollars, perhaps I should show you the source of my consternation:

H&M: What were you thinking?

Uhhhhhhh…I’d be speechless in this case, but, you know, I’m never speechless.

In previous columns, I have expressed empathy for the CEOs of these organizations for not calling because I felt people in the marketing and advertising department would lose their jobs. But in reality, nothing happens. They just go about their days and weeks issuing lame apologies and react to the situation they caused, rather than respond to them.

In case you missed it, the term “monkey” has been used as a racial slur toward African-Americans. Just look at the picture above. In the ad, the African-American is a “monkey” and the Caucasian kid is a “survival expert.” Ugh!

The “monkey” sweatshirt fiasco is yet another miserable reminder of how much more work lies ahead when it comes educating corporations about the consequences of using certain images and messaging. The Swedish clothing giant is learning that lesson firsthand.

A barrage of comments ensued, including multi-platinum recording artist The Weeknd who ended his partnership with H&M:

It didn’t end there. A barrage of comments ensued, with celebs from Questlove and Snoop Dogg to LeBron James and Diddy raucously protesting (and, in some cases, redesigning) the tone-deaf ad via Twitter and Instagram. H&M also lost rapper G-Eazy who also terminated his agreement in advance of the March 1 launch of his H&M collection.

In true cover your ass mode, H&M released a statement saying it had withdrawn the hoodie from sale and would “thoroughly investigate” to make sure there is not a repeat of the incident.

The post H&M: You Should Have Called The Media Guy! appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

…however, I do have just a little expertise on the the subject of cross-culturalism having grown up in Compton and Inglewood in the early and mid-seventies and later working on Middle Eastern tourism accounts in a post-9/11 America. Talk about stereotypes…I lived inside of them! You could ask for a better sitcom setup than being the only five year-old caucasian kid in all-black Los Angeles neighborhood or the same guy as an adult rolling around downtown Damascus leading journalists on tours of the next great world destination.

Mrs. Lee’s husband was some hot-shot…

Soooooooooo, one thing I can spot from a distance is a racism and racist advertising. Even in the 1970s, when no one cared about racist or sexist advertising (well, at least not enough to impact real change) I could spot these ads.

In the seventies, you couldn’t turn on the television without seeing a Calgon commercial. The iconic “Take Me Away” ad, created by Ketchum Advertising, endured for decades in various forms. Take Me Away earned a spot in The Advertising Slogan Hall of Fame (yeah that’s a thing). But it older advertising sibling, “Ancient Chinese Secret,” earned itself a spot in the Media Guy Hall of Shame (no, that’s not a thing).

“Ancient Chinese Secret” takes place in a hole-in-the-wall big city laundry run by a Chinese couple. In the ’70s, Asian-Americans seemingly couldn’t appear on American television unless they were serving up karate chops, walking around in the background as Chinatown gangsters or running laundries at the pleasure of the bourgeois (maybe things haven’t changed much actually). The (probably) very caucasian copywriters who dreamed up “Ancient Chinese Secret” had to have lived in a world where Americans only understood Asian Americans (called then “Orientals”) as people who were extremely adept at getting stains out of bell bottoms. Without a Commissioner of Logic running around checking approved copy, this beauty hit the airways:

Let’s dive into this spot just a bit.

For those of you not aware of the historical significance of the Chinese Laundry, it started with the California Gold Rush of 1849. With the hope of finding gold in “those there mountains,” contract laborers from Southern China scrambled to the Golden State in search fortunes in the gold mines and or working on the railroads. Soon the anti-Chinese sentiment was so strong that immigrants were forced to seek other work.

Myths debunked!

A bit of research showed that in 1851,Wah Lee opened the first US-based Chinese hand laundry in San Francisco. The small storefront in San Francisco had a simple sign: “Wash’ng and Iron’ng.” Quickly, the laundry had expanded to dozens of washermen working three daily shifts. With no special skills or venture capital required, a laundry was an ideal business for Chinese immigrants. By the 1870’s, Chinese laundries were operating in all most western cities firmly cementing the laundry guy as a stereotype that would take a century to defuse.

Chinese laundries have been used in many laundry-related product advertisements, typically in a method that exploits this stereotype. A Lavine Soap trade card showed small, cute, pig-tailed Chinese with the product. The Chinese Laundry Scene, an 1895 silent film5, featured the popular slapstick vaudeville act Robetta and Doretto as an Irish police officer and a Chinese laundry worker quarreling. One print ad for a Hoover home washing machine shows several Chinese men, presumably laundrymen, standing around it with a puzzled look. and on and on.

Back to Mr. Lee. The whole commercial was off from the start. I mean who goes to the dry cleaners simply to get shirts washed? Nobody really did that anymore in the seventies. And the whole “Ancient Chinese Secret” thing? Surely had to be wrong. Right? But month after month, year after year the spot appeared.

I’ve decided back then that if they could get away with that spot, then surely the ad men were some kind of wizards that had the ability to cast a spell on the nation.

The “Ancient Chinese secret, huh?” copywriter? Some hot-shot he must have been!

I mean just a few years earlier, the ad men were crafting dry punch mix commercials that sold out the supermarket with this copy:

“Let’s have some thirsty, tired kids yell, ‘Hey, Kool-Aid!’ 

Then a huge, walking punch pitcher came crashing through a brick wall. High concept indeed. Today, there would be a public outcry that Kool-Aid was promoting wonton destruction of property. Can you imagine the picket signs, pitchforks and angry mob that would descend on Ketchum Advertising today if Mr. Lee was touting that in 2016?

Explain that one, Mr. Lee.

The post The Most Racist Commercial Ever appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

Just who conceived this ad anyway?

Dear Air Canada:

Okay, I get it. It’s January and you’re hell bent on showcasing how to screw up a great start to 2017.

Before I get the what’s really bothering me, let me just say you need to get your freaking act together. I checked the flight board in my terminal and the majority of your flights seem to be either delayed or cancelled. That’s no way to treat your customers.

So yeah yeah “bad weather*” delayed your flight out of Toronto (to the tune of three plus hours), which also means my flight that’s supposed to be on the turnaround back to the Great White North is also delayed and my connection will be long gone. Translation? I’ll be sleeping in a crappy transfer hotel that smells like mold and eating equally crappy hotel food with airline vouchers that never quite cover a full meal.

*sigh*

Seriously? $44.95 for the day pass?

After boarding your 767-300ER plane with overhead bins just big enough to accommodate a couple of duty free bags and a jacket (no I’m not kidding), I settled into my hardened seat with no less than four pieces of leftover trash in the seat pocket in front of me and noticed something alarming: there were NO entertainment options on this flight.

-No monitors mounted in every seat (as promised on your braggadocios website). Not a series of miniature displays ready to motor down after we take off.

-Not a screen mounted on the bulkhead wall. No magazines or newspapers.

-No Sharper Image Monopoly boards to engage my chatty seat mates.

Nope.

Nothing.

I mean I could have purchased an all day wifi pass if I had $44.95 CAD to blow, or if there was a USB port to plug into after my battery waned. Jeez, who would have guessed that a scheduled 9 hour, 10 minute flight would have bubkis?

Certainly not me.

Just then a curious pamphlet screamed to me like a beacon through the seat pocket litter. It read simply: “Player”.

The pamphlet showed the standard smiling Caucasian blonde mother accompanied by her pre-requisite matching 9-year-old daughter in coveralls learning to maneuver on some kind of tablet. She was being helped by a well-appointed African-Canadian flight attendant who seemed eager to kneel down endlessly in the aisle to guide the entitled pre-teen.

(Seriously! Who casts these ads? This one screamed “clueless 1970s ad man” from the second I picked it up. White passengers. Black servers. C’mon already Air Canada! We don’t do ads like this anymore.)

Yet, I digress…

Anyway, this pamphlet solved the mystery…read along with me now, “We hope you are enjoying Player. Air Canada Rouge’s complimentary in-flight entertainment system. If you’d like the enjoy Hollywood new releases and popular games or if you left your device at home, ask your Rouge Crew about renting and Air Pad 2 for only $10.”

It was written in English AND French so it had to be friendly and true, right?

Yeah, thanks Air Canada!

So this is where I get psyched. I have so many devices that could conceivably work. Between my MacBook Pro, mini iPad, and iPhone I must have this wired. One quick ring to the flight attendant** should get me rolling so I could watch Ghostbusters or The Magnificent Seven or even the Christmas classic Die Hard.

And then the bubble burst. My flight attendant let me know that the complimentary portion of their player system was an app that needed to be downloaded prior to takeoff. It was casually suggested that I could download the app and set it up if I purchased the 30-minute wifi pass for $8.95 CAD. Ugh.***

I wound up purchasing the iPad rental for $10; don’t know why. A young Media Guy would have stood on principle and gone sans entertainment as a silent protest to the airline nickel and dime money grab. The older version just wanted to watch Bruce Willis save Christmas at Nokatomi Plaza.

Thanks Air Canada once again. Now I know why there over one thousand posts with the hashtag #AirCanadaSucks on Instagram.

And to top it all off? You lost my luggage even though I checked with your people three times in Toronto.

Get your act together.

With tough love and all due respect,
The Media Guy

P.S. Special shoutout to Mike Waring. He’s the manager at the Toronto Airport Air Canada connection desk. Despite having ample time to put me on a half-full Air Canada flight that wouldn’t take off for nearly an hour, he told me I was out of luck. He doubled down by letting me know there was nothing I could say to make him change his mind. Through a mock genuine smile, he reported that a lot of work was put into placing me on a flight tomorrow. In turn, I let him know that possessing a Napoleonic attitude was no way to run a transfer desk. I mean he didn’t even leave me time to go to the Hockey Hall of Fame. Although my high-brow insult carried excellent comedic timing, I think he won this battle. Thanks Mike!

————–

*-I’m still trying to figure out the bad weather thing since there was no snow or rain or icy conditions in Toronto, nor in sunny Spain where my flight originated. Ah, the airline industry, where lying is just a way of life.

**-By the way, there were no Canadian-African flight attendants as suggested in the pamphlet. Sadly, there weren’t any smiles either.

***-Air Canada, take a note: JetBlue is now giving all passengers free Wi-Fi.

The post CANCELLED: An Open Letter to Air Canada appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.