MEDIA & MARKETING Clive Simpkins
THE advertising colleges in this country are the incubator or nursery of the industry. But it seems that the industrial giants prefer to snatch BComm graduates straight from university and put them through their own version of paediatric marketing pedantry.
The AAA, based in the PWV and Cape Town, positions itself as a training ground for advertising and marketing. Cape Town-based Red & Yellow is more exclusive, positioning itself to produce only graphic designers and copywriters.
I talked to Gordon Cook and Gillian Illic of AAA, and Brian Searle-Tripp of Red & Yellow. It appears that political correctness is a tidge more subtle and slower on the uptake in certain industries. With few exceptions, the advertising industry continues to remain an ivory-skinned monopoly.
Out of a total 325 students in the three colleges, only 48 are black. That’s 15 percent, clearly an unacceptable disparity, for which the blame cannot be laid at the colleges’ respective doors.
Reading between the lines, it appears that young black career seekers often perceive “going into advertising” to mean they’ll appear as models or in TV commercials.
Not their fault or surprising as the ghastly Department of Education and Training (DET) pseudo- education system didn’t offer art or art-appreciation classes. This creates a major problem in bringing embryonic talent to the fore when black students choose graphic design or art directing as a career.
For aspirant copywriters, DET English takes its toll which, politically incorrect and frustrating though it may be, is still the dominant lingua franca of the industry.
The colleges are reluctant to admit it, but the industry is applying enormous pressure on them to produce fledgling black David Ogilvys. Clearly, the advertising and marketing industry is going to have to implement its own reconstruction and development programme to redress imbalances.
There is a strong case for the communications industry to get off its collective butt and start doing some effective communicating, specifically by way of getting the concept of a career in advertising (vulgarly well-paid at that) spread far and wide in schools, technikons, universities and, most importantly, in the black business community.
This is important because, as my personal experience has borne out, many black management organisations are totally self-serving. They simply become yet more elitist old-boys clubs, doing little, if anything, to address critical issues such as these among their own youth.
Making French writer La Rochefoucauld’s words ring all too true: “What appears to be generosity is often only ambition disguised, which despises small interests to pursue great ones.”
How nice, how simple, if each major marketing organisation in the country which advertises (any that don’t?) could get involved. It just needs one young black person sponsored, given a bursary or scholarship (about R10 000 a year) and the industry could be growing a whole new clutch of creative and client-service giants.
Perhaps then we’d be able to move into a genuine flavour Afrique in our advertising. Bet even the Eurocentric caucasians would love it.
* Communications Dynamics MD Clive Simpkins is a leading image consultant and communications expert