The Illusion of Inclusion:

Why Agencies of Color Are Left Out of Multicultural Marketing

The more things change, the more they stay the same or become worse. Twenty-five years ago I started Promotions West, a public relations and marketing firm to address the issue of why advertising and marketing firms refused to work with communities of color. They all wanted to profit from those communities while excluding them from participating in the process. Whenever people of colour were hired in those all-white agencies, it was only for them to be seen and not heard. Years ago, my mentor in broadcast media taught me to always include the priority communities at the table when developing key messages.

Diversity in marketing has become a buzzword — a feel-good term that brands and agencies love to promote. Companies boast about their multicultural campaigns, showcase diverse faces in advertisements, and claim to understand the communities they serve. But behind the scenes, the reality is far less inclusive.

Many major marketing and advertising firms continue to hire white-led agencies and contractors to design and execute campaigns aimed at African Americans/Black, Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and other underrepresented communities. Instead of partnering with firms that look like and understand these communities, they usually opt for white-run agencies that can mimic diversity while maintaining control. The result is a whitewashed version of multicultural marketing that profits from marginalised communities without truly representing them or giving them a voice.

So, why does this happen? It’s amazing how history keeps repeating itself. It often feels like I am living in the past the way our present leadership is obsessed with greed and deceit. And what are the consequences when diversity is treated as a checkbox rather than an authentic commitment?

Marketing agencies and even non-profit organisations are quick to showcase Black and Brown faces in their campaigns, but when you look at who is behind the scenes, the decision-makers, and the ones profiting, the picture is overwhelmingly white. Trust me, there is nothing new about this at all. This continues to happen for several reasons:

Maintaining Control — Large firms prefer to retain power and resources rather than share opportunities with agencies of colour. Hiring a white-led firm to handle “multicultural” campaigns allows them to manage diversity on their terms, without having to engage with with BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour.

Performative Inclusion — Instead of hiring creatives of people of colour, these firms will consult with a handful of people of color for optics, ensuring the campaign looks authentic while keeping major roles and budgets within white-led organizations.

The Trust & Funding Gap — BIPOC-owned public relations and marketing agencies often don’t receive the same trust, funding, or high-profile contracts as their white counterparts, even though they understand the needs of their communities much better. Many brands are still hesitant to put big campaigns in the hands of people from the very communities they claim to want to reach.

Why does this practice hurt the industry and communities? This exclusionary practice isn’t just unfair, it’s harmful to both the communities being marketed to and the industry as a whole. Toned-Deaf campaigns are when marketing firms lack lived experience with the priority communities they are trying to reach, they often get it wrong. Time and time again we have seen countless examples of tone-deaf, offensive, or wildly inaccurate multicultural campaigns because they were created without real cultural insight.

Economic Exclusion — Marketing and advertising are billion-dollar industries, yet BIPOC-owned firms are routinely shut out of high-budget campaigns. Instead of investing in these communities by hiring and uplifting their talent, major firms profit from their culture while retaining the financial benefits within white-led agencies.

Superficial Diversity — Representation in ads is important, but when it’s done without real inclusion, it’s just another form of tokenism. Seeing diverse faces on a billboard or in an ad means nothing if the people behind the campaign don’t reflect that same diversity.

Over the years, there have been a series of advertising campaigns that completely missed the mark because they lacked real cultural insight. Here are some of the worst offenders, along with what went wrong:

• H&M’s Coolest Monkey in the Jungle was released in 2018. They released an ad featuring a Black child wearing a hoodie that read, “Coolest Monkey in the Jungle”. They didn’t believe that it could be problematic. In many cultures, particularly in Black communities, the word ‘monkey’ has been historically used as a racial slur. The fact that a Black child was chosen to wear this hoodie, while white children in the same campaign wore more neutral slogans, showed a deep lack of cultural awareness. No people of colour (POC) were on the creative team. The backlash was immediate, with people asking: “Did no one in H&M’s marketing team see the problem with this ad?” It exposed how brands often lack diversity in decision-making roles, which leads to tone-deaf campaigns.
• Dolce & Gabbana Racist China Ad — Dolce & Gabbana released an ad in 2018 featuring a Chinese woman struggling to eat Italian food, a pizza, with chopsticks while a stereotypical, mocking voiceover instructed her. The ad played into offensive stereotypes about Asian people, implying they are clueless outside their own culture. The backlash in China was so severe that Dolce & Gabbana’s runway show was canceled, and their reputation took a massive hit. It became clear that no one on the marketing team had a real understanding of Chinese culture, or if they did their voices were ignored. This was a clear case of a luxury brand marketing to a culture they didn’t bother to understand.
• Abercombie & Fitch — released a product in 2002 that offended the Asian community. I can never forget the uproar of this racist campaign. Abercrombie & Fitch, one of the most popular clothing stores at that time prided itself on marketing to predominantly young white men. They were investigated and no one on the marketing team was Asian or represented any people of colour. Once they released their new product, the shelves were empty. The racist t-shirt and hoodies said, “Two Wongs Can Make it White”, making fun at a Wong Brothers wash and fold laundry service. The line of clothing was immediately removed from all of their stores and their reputation was destroyed. Those in charge argued they did nothing wrong and didn’t understand why people were upset.
• Heineken’s Sometimes Lighter is Better — released an ad in 2018 for a light beer, where a bartender slides a Heineken bottle past several Black people before it reaches a light-skinned woman. The tagline was “Sometimes lighter is better.” The ad unintentionally promoted colourism, the harmful idea that lighter skin is better than darker skin. Given the historical context of racism and colourism, this was a huge mistake. Just from experience, if a diverse marketing team had been present, someone would have pointed out the issue before it aired. The ad was quickly pulled after backlash.
• Dove’s Real Beauty Campaign — received a lot of heat for releasing an ad showing a Black woman lifting her t-shirt and turning into a white woman after using the brand’s lotion. Many called the spot racist, and it spurred hashtags on social media like #DoneWithDove and #DoveMustFall. Others, however, argued the ad was not racist, and instead was an attempt to be diverse and show off different models.
• Similar to the media advertisement where the Black woman turns white, there was a print ad that suggested that being Black was the ‘before’ and being white was the ‘after.’ Hard to interpret that any other way.

The Australian Human Rights Commission created a brilliant ad that made me smile and think about the many times that this has happened to me. It’s called, Elevator — Racism. It Stops With Me. When I was a young boy, I used to ask my mother why white men and women were so afraid of me. She would usually smile and tap me on the head. As I grew up and worked in a variety of places all over the country, the same thing happened whenever I entered my place of employment. The ad highlights casual and everyday racism in a work environment and the provision of goods and services. The people who experience racism in these places are Aboriginal or Indigenous men and women with an African background. The Commission’s independent research found that Aboriginal (First Nation’s People) and Torres Strait Islander people, and those with an African background often experience racism at work or while using public transportation.

What needs to change to make things better? Well, we can start by hiring agencies that reflect the communities being targeted. If a campaign is targeting Black, Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islanders, or Indigenous communities, work with firms that are led by people from those neighbourhoods. They bring authenticity, insight, and real lived experiences that no amount of research can replicate. For several years my colleagues and I tried convincing leaders at various public health departments in California to consider this path. Regardless of focus groups and ethnographic studies, they refused to do so.

Another potential solution would be to shift the power and budgets. Instead of just consulting with or hiring a few BIPOC creatives, give them leadership roles and full control over campaigns. Token hires are not enough, real equity means shifting resources and decision-making power. One of the long-term managers at the San Francisco Department of Public Health kept telling me “This is the way we do things.” Repeatedly, I reminded him that over the years their campaigns were failures because they didn’t listen to the priority audiences they wanted to reach. It was believed that if you give money to the various communities, then you can tell them what to do and how to respond to surveys. Well, it didn’t work.

It would be advantageous to start calling out performative diversity. The next time a brand releases a “diverse” campaign, simply ask:

• Who created this campaign?
• Who got paid to create it?
• Who benefited from it?

If the answer is a white-led firm profiting off communities of colour, it’s time to push for real change within the organisation. Common sense tells us that diversity can’t be whitewashed, although companies keep trying to do it. Diversity in marketing should not be an illusion. It’s not enough to showcase Black and Brown faces on screen while keeping the power, money, and decision-making in white hands. True inclusion means hiring the people who live and breathe these cultures, not just as consultants or faces in a campaign, but as the architects behind the message. Until major firms start prioritising real equity over multicultural marketing, public relations, and advertising will remain exactly what it is today, a carefully curated performance, rather than a genuine commitment to inclusion.