How to make a diverse ad that doesn’t offend

Heinz is currently weathering a storm of controversy after not one but two of its ads were called out for their racial tropes.

A Joker-themed ad for Heinz featuring a black man with ketchup smeared around his mouth was criticised for having ‘blackface’ connotations and resembling minstrel shows. Another Heinz poster ad on the London Underground – featuring an interracial couple on their wedding day minus the black father of the bride – was criticised for perpetuating the stereotype of absent black fathers. Heinz has since apologised and pulled both ads.

Is it shocking that a global brand like Heinz can display such racial insensitivity and make these kinds of “mistakes” in this day and age? Sadly not. Heinz is by no means the only brand to offend audiences in this way in recent years.

H&M’s “coolest monkey” hoodie and Gucci’s ‘Blackface’ polo neck saw both brands blasted for racism. Meanwhile, in 2022, Christmas campaigns from the likes of Lidl, Shelter and Tesco were called out by the Diversity Standards Collective for tokenism, negative stereotyping and inauthentic representation.

The Home Office was slammed a few years back for stereotyping black people after putting anti-knife crime branding on chicken boxes. And who could forget Pepsi’s whitewashing of Black Lives Matter? Despite these well-publicised disasters, brands continue to fail when it comes to representation.

So what is going wrong? The key issue here is the lack of – and in some organisations, total absence of – diversity in the room. If you’re trying to communicate with people from different ethnicities and communities, a key requirement should be that you have people from those ethnicities or communities involved in the creation of the campaign, from conception right through to sign-off. Brands, agencies and marketing teams urgently need to boost diversity in their teams at all levels, especially in key decision-making roles.

Brands and agencies should always sense-check their output. Invest in research and test the work with focus groups and DEI organisations. If a focus group made up of people of colour had seen those two Heinz ads, they would have immediately flagged the connotations and racial tropes on display – and saved the brand a lot of damage.

The Heinz fallout shows how important it is for creative teams to interrogate the idea at all times. In the case of the Joker-themed ad, the other two executions in the campaign featured white models, which makes the black model seem like a tokenistic choice, made without any consideration for the image’s racist overtones.

Marketers and agencies should be interrogating the idea at all times and continuously improving on it with every execution. This requires seeking out objective opinions and ensuring people feel empowered to call out issues. Creativity thrives in an inclusive, collaborative culture where objectivity and constructive criticism are not only encouraged but actively sought out.

Creativity should always be on the edge, and marketers should treat every campaign as an opportunity to deliver the most impactful work. That involves not only pushing creativity to its limits, but doing everything you can to make sure what you’re putting into the world is created with sensitivity, care and consideration.

In the ad industry, the buck stops with the brand and real change happens when brands and their marketing teams model it and demand it from their agency partners and suppliers. Hopefully, these missteps prompt Heinz and brands like it to stop treating DE&I as a mere box-ticking exercise. 

Brands and agencies need to wake up to the fact that the real rewards come from breaking out of the industry bubble and getting a deeper understanding of their audiences.