Advertising sucks. Mr. Webber puts the industry on blast!

Harry Webber attempted to post this response earlier today at AdAge. For some reason it never made it to their blog. (I thought I would blast it here) See the original post here.


Advertising sucks.

No really. As an industry. You people are an embarrassment to the American ideal of liberty and justice for all. And you are an insult to the memory of every black or Hispanic soldier who ever shed blood or lost lives for American ideals on foreign soil. 

But not just because of your narrow-minded and myopic world view. Your arrogance in the face of a documented history of biased hiring practices and brutal, systemic racism has singled you out as an example of an under-educated culture of self-important Neanderthals that have elevated the worst of our Nations character flaws to an mean-spirited art form.

This on-going act of white supremacy will continue as long as this industry is allowed to indulge in defacto apartheid. The truth is that this industry is not diverse for one reason and one reason alone. You people simply don't want to work with anybody who doesn't look like you. That's it.

There is no conspiracy here to deprive people of their equal rights. There is a culture here that seeks to replicate the esthetic of the Third Reich. Nobody says, "Don't hire that guy because he's black." It is simply "understood" that a black person is just "not the right fit" for the team.

How do you live with yourselves? How do you face the black child that comes home with your tween-aged daughter, announced as her "Best Friend For Life," knowing her father or mother would be dismissed as a candidate for employment in your firm because of something as trivial as the pigmentation of their skin?


I have witnessed your handiwork in the broken lives of those you have robbed of any chance of a meaningful future. When Derek Walker wrote, "I love advertising, but advertising doesn't love me," I cried at the funeral of his life's aspirations. When they found the great Georg Olden dead in the front seat of his gold Cadillac, his reward for a lifetime of amazing work a self-inflicted bullet to his fertile brain, a part of me went with him to Paradise. When I think of generations of gifted Black and Hispanic creatives whose books got them interviews only to be told, "Have you considered Burrell?", my heart shudders with grief. When they are left unattended to and abandoned by interviewers who simply turned on their heel when they saw the owner of the portfolios ethnicity, a little part of me dies with their spirit as they sit there and wait. And wait. And wait.

How can you people be so ruthless to your fellow human beings? And then pat yourselves on the back for being masters of the universe.

This article is another testament to your worth as individuals and your merit as an industry. You boast of your technical achievements, yet you embrace the mentality of red neck share croppers. How do you face yourselves in the mirror?

Advertising sucks. Not because of what it does, but because of what it's done. Pitiful.


So much for an "open" forum.

h.

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