ROB ROSE: Clicks, the EFF, and the failure to think
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Clicks CEO Vikesh Ramsunder first saw the advertisement that caused all the trouble last Friday, as it began to attract heat on social media.
The contrasting images, created by Unilever’s Tresemmé brand and posted on the Clicks website, was of a white woman’s head with the description “normal hair” next to a black woman’s head, with “frizzy and dull hair”.
“Immediately, I saw it as racist,” Ramsunder tells the FM. “I told them: ‘There’s no way you can defend this — we’ve got it horribly wrong.’ It was really disappointing — I just couldn’t believe it had come from our organisation,” he tells the FM.
What mystified him, he says, is that the digital marketing team — two white people, two black people and a coloured manager — didn’t see the problem.
“I couldn’t believe they’d signed it off. I mean, we’re not an untransformed organisation, yet somehow we missed this as a team. I called a special board meeting for Sunday, and spent the weekend thinking what went wrong,” he says.
It’s what everyone has been asking. You’d think retailers would have learnt from the roasting H&M got in 2018, when it advertised a hooded jacket modelled by a black child bearing the phrase “Coolest monkey in the jungle”.
Thuli Madonsela, for one, calls it a “textbook case of unconscious bias”. Others were less generous.
Ramsunder has thought about this a lot. One answer is that Tresemmé has been sending marketing material to Clicks for years, so “maybe complacency crept in — the stuff gets routinely uploaded, and maybe we stopped asking questions. The oversight was obviously not strong enough.”
Tshegofatso Phetlhe, art director at M&C Saatchi Abel, says when she first saw the Clicks advert, “it just exhausted me”.
“It’s not even a case of the fact that they didn’t learn any lessons from the H&M issue, it’s that they clearly thought that diversity was just a trend that would disappear, not an ongoing conversation,” she tells the FM.
She says it should have been obvious to anyone that there was something wrong with the advert — the fact that it wasn’t, illustrates that the wrong people were in the room.
Most likely, she says, someone looked at the advert without thinking, and felt “this looks diverse”.
“At face value, it might have ticked the ‘diversity box’, but nobody really sat down and thought: ‘Is this substantively right ...
The contrasting images, created by Unilever’s Tresemmé brand and posted on the Clicks website, was of a white woman’s head with the description “normal hair” next to a black woman’s head, with “frizzy and dull hair”.
“Immediately, I saw it as racist,” Ramsunder tells the FM. “I told them: ‘There’s no way you can defend this — we’ve got it horribly wrong.’ It was really disappointing — I just couldn’t believe it had come from our organisation,” he tells the FM.
What mystified him, he says, is that the digital marketing team — two white people, two black people and a coloured manager — didn’t see the problem.
“I couldn’t believe they’d signed it off. I mean, we’re not an untransformed organisation, yet somehow we missed this as a team. I called a special board meeting for Sunday, and spent the weekend thinking what went wrong,” he says.
It’s what everyone has been asking. You’d think retailers would have learnt from the roasting H&M got in 2018, when it advertised a hooded jacket modelled by a black child bearing the phrase “Coolest monkey in the jungle”.
Thuli Madonsela, for one, calls it a “textbook case of unconscious bias”. Others were less generous.
Ramsunder has thought about this a lot. One answer is that Tresemmé has been sending marketing material to Clicks for years, so “maybe complacency crept in — the stuff gets routinely uploaded, and maybe we stopped asking questions. The oversight was obviously not strong enough.”
Tshegofatso Phetlhe, art director at M&C Saatchi Abel, says when she first saw the Clicks advert, “it just exhausted me”.
“It’s not even a case of the fact that they didn’t learn any lessons from the H&M issue, it’s that they clearly thought that diversity was just a trend that would disappear, not an ongoing conversation,” she tells the FM.
She says it should have been obvious to anyone that there was something wrong with the advert — the fact that it wasn’t, illustrates that the wrong people were in the room.
Most likely, she says, someone looked at the advert without thinking, and felt “this looks diverse”.
“At face value, it might have ticked the ‘diversity box’, but nobody really sat down and thought: ‘Is this substantively right ...